


Journeyman

by Nemonus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-06 15:30:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 53,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1108497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abandoned by Sidious, Darth Maul tries to find his place by retracing his steps in the wake of his brother's death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_You have travelled a long way, my apprentice._

_You waited for this. I should have seen your urge to build an empire. That age-old instinct of the Sith could not quite be quelled, even in you, the one who was always meant to be the sacrificial animal. The spirits of Darth Bane and Freedon Nadd, the old ones, all of them flow through you via the Force just as they do through me. The past is never as important as the present, but I should have known._

_And I did know, Darth Maul, from the moment you bit my hand. You were a boy, then, but those small realizations did not stop as you aged, even though you learned the same lessons over and over. First you learned that I was breaking the Rule of Two, and then you learned who_ I _was breaking it against: Darth Plagueis, the late great father of too much dark life. He achieved almost enough to create his own Chosen One before I killed him. Then, you, Darth Maul, would never have survived at all._

_But now the playing field is a bit more_ level _. Plagueis is dead, my Chosen One thinks he is the most righteous man in the galaxy and will even more so now, after his Padawan walks out of the Jedi Temple to get away from him. We are all just fathers watching our children leave us, my apprentice. I doubt you'll live to understand. It's what we do after that matters. It is how we turn our hatred for our children into greatness._

_But that is all permutations, options, possibilities - you don't operate like that, do you? There's one thing in your mind, one at a time. In creating that focus, I have succeeded completely._

_You tried to fight me, here on Mandalore. You tried to create your own small empire out of rocks and dirt and blind beings leading the blind._

_Mandalore._

_I trained you to rule men, certainly. That is the way of the Sith. We must know_ some _subterfuge. But look at you. Even on the black ground of this plaza, even with your clothing torn and your skin burnt and smoking, your instinct is not to rally help from anyone else. They have all left you, your brother dead and the Mandalorians engaged in their private war of political and parochial revenge._

_You snarl up at me and are poised, perfectly, alone._

_I cannot kill you yet. It would be like tearing up a symphony._

_But I cannot have you around, either, following me to Coruscant like a stray dog._ Look at you. _It's a fortunate bit of chance that Zabraks look so much like the devils of human stories, and utterly convenient that the Dathomirians made you even more fearsome with their marks. Ithorians and Devaronians and sentient blobs of gas hold seats in the Senate, and Zabraks too, but you were raised to walk like a monster, and you would never survive in the congress. A perfect assassin, you are a terrible spy._

_You are still trying to rise, the Force lurching and crackling inside your presence. When the lightning hits you you fall again, panting, sparks jumping between your jaws._

_"I will not kill you yet," your master says. "I still have plans for you."_

* * *

Darth Maul slumped with his hands between his knees as if he had been cuffed.

He had not. Sidious was surely testing him, allowing him to sit freely in the rearmost, smallest passenger compartment of this lavish, sleek ship and watching his every move. It was odd to be back in his master's presence, thinking these thoughts. For a long time he had just wanted to get back to Sidious, to bow before him again, to take orders. Then, after Sidious had killed Savage just as Maul was beginning to feel a grudging respect for him that may or may not have had its roots in their familial bond, Maul had realized that his master had discarded him. All Maul's work, all the time he had spent fighting across the galaxy to make a massacre big enough to draw Sidious' attention, had failed. He raged against his master, lifting hands that felt as heavy as if they had been chained. He growled, lips pulled back from his teeth. It ached to move. The Force lightning had not scarred him, but it hurt. It would hurt, he knew, for days, and the pain was already setting his face into a frown and pulling at the skin between his eyes. He would not refuse the offer of a Mandalorian helmet now.

But his days as a crime lord were over. He was back with Sidious now.

Except that Sidious had strange plans for him.

Maul had been swapping back and forth between those thoughts for the last half an hour, while the ship lifted off to parts unknown.

_Stay? Go? Wait?_

He was tired. He shifted, dragging his mechanical foot back and forth across the floor.

Perhaps Sidious was allowing him to walk relatively free in the ship because Sidious wanted to give an illusion of freedom.

Maul did not know, and after real freedom - years, unpleasant and murky but free, without a master - the idea rankled as much as it comforted.

But it did comfort.

Obi-Wan was still alive. That was the one thing that had not changed through all of Maul's years - he had always been hunting for that man, no matter what mission he mentally put before it. Obi-Wan could throw Maul off any trail he was following, could drag Maul back into the blind hatred that had come close, _so close_ , to destroying Obi-Wan.

Maul should not have bothered with killing Satine. The role of warlord had worked for him, and killing Satine was something that Pre Viszla would do and his troops would support. So Maul had played at barbarian Mandalorian, enjoying the waves of horror and grief from Obi-Wan's Force presence even as the nature of his victim mattered little to his choice of fate for her.

Satine had bought Obi-Wan time, though, even if she hadn't known she was doing it.

Maul stood up. More aches made themselves known along his shoulders. He made a mental note of the numbness of his metal limbs, which was not so much a relief as a mark on a checklist.

_My arms will ache tomorrow. My legs will not._

He had gotten used to the balance of the legs the Mandalorians had built for him.

He knocked on the inside of the door of the passenger compartment and received no answer. Darth Sidious would not travel with a crew, but it looked to Maul like the ship had been requisitioned from the Republic in Sidious' role as Chancellor Palpatine. The carpet was yellow and plush, the walls silver, curving, and clean. There were Naboo touches in the design, if Maul recognized them correctly. Sidious had not quite shaken off the aesthetic instincts of his peaceful home planet.

When the door did not open, Maul dug his fingers into the shallow groove of the handle and pulled. The door shushed against the carpet. The second room was, as he had guessed, a larger sitting room: both also had entrances onto the central hallway that lead to the exit ramp. He could barely feel the ship's floor shaking beneath him as the engines underneath did their work.

The ship couldn't have gotten far, being in hyperspace this long. It could not have gotten from Mandalore to Coruscant. Maul would have time to find out what Sidious was doing.

He could not decide whether to take an angry or a subservient mien in front of his master, and it was strange not to simply go with his emotions, to have to make that decision. But his time on Mandalore had taught him the value of a sabaac face, and, before that Lotho Minor had given him years to do all the expressing he had ever wanted. It was time for something a bit more contained now. Something with purpose.

He moved into the hallway and found the doors to the bridge. They opened with a touch. Sidious was sitting just to the right of the canopy, with three short, square droids plugged into other systems. This ship would normally need a larger crew, Maul noticed. Instead, Sidious had brought his mechanical helpers - droids who didn't look like they had a lot of personality. Their memories would be wiped as soon as they got back to Coruscant, he was sure.

Sidious turned to look at him. The old man's hood was raised, his gnarled hands folded inside his sleeves.

"Where are we going, master?"

"Do you know why I haven't shackled you?" Sidious said.

Maul narrowed his eyes. Again there was that sense of decision. He was not used to playing conversations like card games, but he had learned - from Pre Visla, from his time in Cog Hive Seven, that vast sums could be won or lost in the game of words. Maul had viewed disappointing his master as the worst possible transgression, before he head learned. "I had wondered."

"Discard your guesses," Sidious said. "You will be taken to your next mission. you will find out what it is soon enough."

"You have a mission for me?"

Maul could hardly see Sidious's eyes, but he saw the man's expression go crafty. The Force tickled at the back of Maul's mind, warning him of deception.

"I am curious about your time among the Mandalorians," Sidious said. "You nearly killed Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"He was my second priority. I wished to return to you."

"Yes. Well. And you had your brother with you."

"I understand that Savage had worked against you before." There had been a lot that Maul missed while on Lotho Minor, a lot of names like Count Dooku and Asajj Ventress that he did not recognize, but he had pieced together from Savage's opinionated narrative an image of the war that he had been involved in.

Maul nodded. What had happened in the past didn't matter any more.

Sidious looked up. "Ah. There are our visitors now."

Maul did not know what signal Sidious had received. Presumably it was from the Force, not from the ship, because hyperspace was still whipping by outside the canopy. The ship slowed, then, through no apparent effort of Sidious' own. The droids were bringing it in to coordinates that he must have pre-set.

As soon as realspace snapped back into visibility, Maul felt dread in the Force.

There was a ship floating in front of them, far enough away that it would not be washed by the gravitic waves of Sidious's ship's exit from hyperspace but close enough that Maul could see it was large, five stories if it had been a building. The outside was brown, whether from paint or age Maul could not tell, and studded with irregular rivets and yellow-shining windows.

The occupants of that ship were riled and uneasy.

Sidious stood. The droids beeped and blinked, quite possibly bringing the ship into a docking vector with the brown craft. "Come with me, my apprentice," Sidious said.

He glided out of the bridge. Maul looked across the room at the hooded face for a moment. Even with his mechanical legs and Sidious' increasingly wizened stature, the master was still taller than the apprentice.

Something was wrong with the ship they were meeting. Maul could sense it.

He hesitated at the door. Sidious looked back at him, his hood falling from his wrinkled head. Sidious had wisps of white hair and heavy eyebrows. "What do you sense, my apprentice?"

"Fear. Anger."

"Such are the ways of the galaxy."

They proceeded to the door, Sidious was staid, and Maul wary and curious. The two ships docked a few minutes later with a slight clunking sound. It relieved some of Maul's boredom and some of his tension. Whatever happened, would happen. He did not have his lightsaber at his side, which could pose a problem if anyone he faced was heavily armed, but he was confident in his ability to quickly acquire a weapon. If the beings beyond this door were of such authority or such inscrutability that he needed to fight them with something besides a physical weapon, well - time would also tell. He blinked.

The airlocks opened, warning lights changing from angry red to mild yellow and verdant green.

The group of people standing beyond were dressed in mis-matched clothes and armor: a flightsuit here, a vest there, a poncho with a hood over the face of a woman with wrinkled tan skin. A human carrying a blaster rifle in a shoulder holster lead the group. He had a neatly trimmed black mustache and beard, and light blue eyes; he carried himself like a noble but wore oil-stained brown pants and a loose-fitting, equally stained tan shirt. His forearms were armored with metal gauntlets.

"Welcome, gentlemen," Sidious said.

The leader stepped into the ship, looking around at both sides of the hallway as if afraid that something would rush him from just beyond his field of vision. "Hello sir," he said. Even with that tiny sentence he talked with his hands, gesturing in a sort of shrug, perhaps a practiced movement to show off the gauntlets. The jointed green-black armor plates covered his hands to the knuckles, but did not seem to be equipped with any kind of projectile or energy shield. The people behind him shifted, also looking suspiciously at Maul and Sidious. He could not read anything in their Force senses more than the sense of betrayal and anger he had been receiving on the whole mission.

It wasn't that Maul did not want to fight Sidious, but that he was at this point simply curious about what Sidious would do next: Maul had taken all this time to get back to him, and now, he would let Sidious move the next piece in the game, if the rest of his life was going to be a game.

"Go with them," Sidious said.

Maul looked at him. The newcomers shuffled forward, the Force rising more and more nervous around them. The second person in the group was a tall Twi'lek, blue-skinned, the lekku hanging behind his shoulders down his back almost hidden from view under bands of leather, a handband, and a brown cloak.

"This is your mission," Sidious said.

The armed newcomers were looking more and more nervous. The leader glanced at Maul's hands, and Maul thought that he was surprised to see them unbound. "Who are they?" Maul asked, not looking at Sidious.

"They are the next step," Sidious said, and put a hand on Maul's back to push him toward the grimier ship.

The Twi'lek came forward with binders. Maul flinched backward, and felt an abrupt, powerful push from behind him that knocked him off his feet. Only once he was on the floor did he feel the intent behind it - Sidious was trying to get rid of him, and these were his jailers. Maul levered up onto his elbows, the boots of the nearer two beings filling up his field of vision. He started to frame the word "why" and took a breath in instead, projecting his question at Sidious through the Force and saving his breath for the punch the Twi'lek was swinging at him.

Maul caught it on his forearm and reared back to put some distance between him and the second human, who was raising a blaster just like their leader had.

He saw Sidious put a gentle hand on the leader's shoulder. The man flattened his back against the wall.

A twisted streak of Force lightning lanced through the connecting corridor and slammed into Maul. He felt his shoulder collide with the floor of the other ship, uneven rivets digging at and dragging into his skin. Two blaster shots landed on either side of him, striking sparks off of the floor and the wall. Maul heaved himself up again, looking back at Sidious, half furious and half imploring.

"He's yours now," Sidious said quietly to the leader, and Force-pushed that man too.

Maul saw the leader's pale palms coming toward him as the man fell over Maul and rolled, springing to his feet further inside the corridor of his own ship. The Twi'lek and the female human were momentarily shocked. Behind them, the airlock at the edge of Sidious's ship closed. There was no window: Maul could only fear the retracting presence of his master, and that same thrum of betrayal that he had always known was there.

It had been a prophecy, Maul knew now. He growled, baring his teeth. He just hadn't known who was going to fulfill that prophecy.

Either these people were going to kill him or he was going to fight them until the ship broke open and released them all into space.

He thought for a moment of asking his new shipmates who they were. The leader rounded on him, cursing in what Maul thought might be Correllian but still maintaining his stiff, upper-class demeanor. They were confusing, wondering whether the door to the ship had short-circuited, stunned by Sidious's powers. Maul shoved to his feet.

"Get back! Further inside!" The Twi'lek yelled, and Maul realized that the lights on their side of the airlock had just shifted from green to yellow. The leader was inside the ship fully, beyond the second set of doors, but his two underlings were still very close to the ship's skin.

And that change in light meant that Sidious' ship must be undocking.

Maul jumped toward the inner hallway, and slapped the door closed with the Force while he did it. He saw the two crewmembers flinch away from the outer door.

"Stop!" The leader yelled ineffectually.

The crewmembers had figured out rapidly that they were going to be exposed to space in a moment. Sidious's ship had started up: Maul could feel the engines humming.

He turned to the leader, reaching out to choke the man from two feet away. "Where are the escape pods?"

"No way."

Maul squeezed tighter, imagining the ridges of the man's esophagus under his fingers, maybe even his _teeth_ if this lasted too long, because those other two were -

The two crewmembers figured out quickly that they had an emergency seal inside the airlock. White gases were just beginning to escape the door seal as Sidious' ship pulled away when the human punched a button that shut the door on their side.

Maul slammed the leader against the wall. "Where?" he tried one more time, and the door to the airlock opened. The two came out guns blazing. One bolt hit Maul, burning what felt like a hole all the way through his right side. He wrenched the blaster out of the human's hand with the Force, smacking the Twi'lek with the gun on the way. The blaster clattered against the wall. There was a cross-corridor just a few steps away, but all Maul knew about the ship was that the escape pods didn't appear to be in this corridor.

(Worries wormed up inside him - even if he got in an escape pod, its very name an implication of relief, would Sidious' ship turn and shoot him down? Sidious did not want him.)

"This was a terrible deal!" The Twi'lek yelled.

"I didn't think - " The leader started, and Darth Maul grabbed him by the throat again.

"Where are we?" Maul asked. "What system?"

He threw the man against the other human, and both of them slumped against the wall. "We're in Hutt Space," the Twi'lek said, his voice shaking.

Maul's lip curled.

"Terrible deal," the leader repeated.

"What was the deal?"

The leader hesitated.

Maul picked up both of them and threw again. They skidded down the corridor, skulls slamming against the floor. He knew in the Force that one was dead and the other dying The Twi'lek lunged at him, raising his heavy blaster high above his shoulder to bring it down toward him like a club.

Maul grabbed his opponent's arm and twisted to the left, breaking the wrist with one of his own hands. The Twi'lek cried out, and Maul hit him in the face with the heel of the other hand, sending him reeling back toward the wall with a broken nose. The urge to kill them roiled in him, but he was reminded too vividly of Hondo's pirates. A gang could be useful. It was almost a pity, that he had learned to work in that way. Killing them would have been much more satisfying, much more quickly.

"Tell me why I was handed over to you," he said, backing the Twi'lek against the wall. Blood started running in dark streams out of his nose.

"This, this is a prison ship!" he said. "He told us you'd be - we thought it was routine!"

Maul narrowed his eyes. This was the second time in his life he had been on a prison ship and he had a lot less reason to stay on this one now. So Sidious had thrown him out again, intending to grind him between the gears of the big machine. The last time, it had been the conflict between Sidious and Plagueis that had required the sacrifice of Maul's time and body. This time, what? Maybe Sidious was simply done with him. This was not his war.

He felt suddenly tired, like weights had been strung from his arms and shoulders.

"What planet?"

The Twi'lek, eyes wide, shook his head in confusion.

"Where is the prison you serve?"

"We're freelancers - Bandomeer! We're going to Bandomeer. This was going to be our last stop."

"And you've dropped out of hyperspace to meet my ship?"

"We're at the planet now. We were just going to meet...whoever your patron was...before we landed..."

"Had he paid you yet?"

"I don't know. Cap - the captain does that..."

Maul recalled what he could of the planet Bandomeer. Cut in half by one large continent and one large sea, it was a mining planet, if he remembered correctly. He had whole libraries of mnemonics with which he had learned about the galaxy, and Bandomeer was mining. He had an inkling that it was dangerous but not inhospitable. He air was breathable, but perhaps it had local infighting, or dangerous animals. It could have been worse. He could have been near Kril'dor or Mustafar.

Maul closed his lips over his teeth. He would play nice, now, to perhaps get this information faster.

"Where are the escape pods?"

The Twi'lek glanced to the left.

As soon as Maul thought that the captain might be sending reinforcements, though, he heard their footsteps ringing on the decking.

Maul reached out, grabbed a hunk of the Twi'lek's headdress on the back of his head, not caring whether it was cloth or skin he held. He held his other arm across his jailer's neck like a bar, hauling him backward. He kicked and struggled and smacked his head into Maul's nose. His vision blurred as pain burst across the bridge of his nose. He rolled his arm up, pressing down on the Twi'lek's throat, and felt him stop moving as he gasped for breath. When four similarly ragtag crew members careened around the corner where the captain had fallen, blasters in hand, Maul pushed the Twi'lek in front of him.

"Don't shoot!" Someone called almost immediately, a human man with blonde braided hair wrapped around his otherwise bald skull.

Maul looked down at him over the top of the Twi'lek's head.

The man got the idea.

Maul walked to the left-hand corridor and saw the escape pod doors there, the thick, ridged clamps around the doors a universal give-away. The message was clear. _Let me go, or I kill him._ He pushed further on the Twi'lek' throat for emphasis. He was more angry than scared: Maul could sense that in the Force. Maybe the Twi'lek would try to break away again. Maybe that would work out in the long run. Sow some confusion among the ranks. Maul had implied that he would make a deal, after all.

The other troops shuffled slowly backward as Maul approached the airlock. He pressed down on the release with the Force, and the door clicked as it opened.

"Don't come after me," he said.

The braided man's brow furrowed, and that as well as the Force warned that he was about to shoot. The Twi'lek wouldn't like that.

Maul was about to move anyway. He pushed the Twi'lek out of the way and backed into the escape pod as the blaster bolt impacted against the wall between them.

Hopefully, when that door closed he wouldn't have to think about these people any more

Hopefully, they wouldn't shoot him down.

More people emerged at the end of the hall. The Twi'lek straightened up and glared both at Maul and the braided man, raising his fisted blue hands in a shaky fighting stance.

Maul snatched the blaster out of the braided man's hand with the Force. As soon as it smacked into his palm he pumped the trigger, firing two bolts into the man's chest and one into the crowd. They returned fire, one bolt burying itself in his shoulder and others burning painlessly into his metal legs as he somersaulted backwards. His legs whirled, acting as a shield. When he landed, he could still walk. He took one step back into the escape pod and punched the release. It would take time for the computer to send the pod flinging out into space, time in which the jailers might rally to stop him. He crouched, tired, wanting to fall backward into the small gray jumpseats on either side of the spherical pod, but he had to be ready for whatever came through that door. The Force was crowded with frustration and malice, and he thought that he should have killed more of them. They seemed so incapable, so disorganized. This wasn't a prison ship: it was a bunch of pirates at best, the only transport Sidious could have found out here.

The ship lurched, and Maul looked at the computer lights behind him. The escape pod was falling away. He took one step to a seat and sat heavily, waiting for what would come next. They could shoot at him if they wanted.

That had, really, been nothing like Cog Hive Seven. It had not lasted as long, for starters, and had not been as difficult.

As revolutionary, maybe. It was just now hitting him that Sidious had truly abandoned him. Fear was his ally but he could take hints even through all of the fear. What now? Even after Lotho Minor he had some direction - find Savage, find Obi-Wan.

He could still find Obi-Wan.

The idea of facing the Jedi, though, just left him tired. Had he grown bored of revenge? The idea sloshed around in his head while the escape pod lights started a landing sequence.


	2. Chapter 2

Darth Maul rubbed at the cloth above his metal knee and sat back, wondering what he was going to do now. The planet below was a mystery, and Maul was, for the first time in a long time, alone. He had wanted to be back in the arena against the Jedi and had now been thrown out of it again. And in another possibility, his brother would be sitting beside him now. He had not loved Savage, but the lost Nightbrother had been a useful ally, toward the end, and someone whom Maul respected. Meeting the Mandalorians and seeing their varying kinds of honor had reinforced his belief that despite their differences and Maul's general disregard for secular codes, Maul and Savage believed in the same kind of honor.

_What would Sidious have done with Savage, if he had lived?_

Of course he would not have. Savage had fought against Sidious, against this new blood Dooku, too much. But Maul felt now like his time with his brother was long ago and far away, that there was a world in which Savage's upbringing had aligned with his, in which both of them would be standing here, exchanging glances and needles of emotion in the Force, waiting for orders.

It was a pity that the younger Zabrak had been so thick-headed. He had been stupid, charging ahead at the wrong moment. Maul had, unfortunately, not been able to teach him how to identify the right moments. Maul had felt clumsy trying to be a master.

Now, he wasn't even a clumsy apprentice any more.

His metal legs had been damaged, but not beyond repair. He fingered three blaster holes in his pants, leading to burnt and flaking metal. The metal legs had been an efficient shield, but it would be too dangerous to use that move in the future. He was not harmless without his ability to walk, but he was effectively incapacitated from fulfilling any of his desires.

Or would have been, if he knew what they were.

The escape pod fell. Maul had never been in one before, but he was sure that there was supposed to be this much shaking: the pod was plummeting through an atmosphere, of course, and clouds jostled even vessels made for them. He could land in an ocean or in a farmer's field. It was all - more shaking, lights still green - up to chance.

He closed his eyes and waited for the Force to rise up to meet him like the ground.

Both did.

The pod shook and shook when it hit the dirt. How it stayed upright he did not know: the pod must have had hydraulics and powered brains that he did not and did not need to understand. Maybe it would aim him toward a population center, and maybe it would not. He gritted his teeth, and despite his best efforts at a meditative attitude opened them as the ship ground to a halt, dirt clattering around him. He was not in the water.

One slow blink later the lights dimmed and the door of the pod lurched open with a loud hydraulic cracking sound. When the smell and taste of grass and rich dirt outside rushed in he realized how stale the air of the escape pod had been. He emerged cautiously.

The smell of grass must have been coming from farther up the slope, because he saw immediately that he was in a wide quarry. He was faced with a gray rock face as tall as his ship _Scimitar_. Black caves opened up into the sloped, rocky bottom of the quarry: from how it looked and from what he knew about this planet, it was clearly a mine. He craned his neck to look around the escape pod and into the other side of the quarry. No one was working here at the moment. There was no machinery left abandoned, although some food wrappers and sundry trash had been washed, presumably during the last rainstorm, into milky puddles of greenish water around the quarry.

The other side had a gentler slope, with a criss-crossing path cut into it for the miners to move up and down. As Maul got closer, tread marks on the dirt seemed to indicate that more droids than organic beings worked these mines. The path was easily accessible, and he started to make his way up.

He still had the blaster he had taken from the captain of the jail ship. He pushed it under his belt, knowing that the makeshift holster would not last if he got in to some serious action, or likely even if he slipped on loose dirt on his way up the switchbacking path. It would have to do for now.

He proceeded slowly, looking at the irregular oval of sky that he could see above the deep quarry. The occasional cloud, heavy but brown with smog, passed overhead through the clear blue sky. It was a contradictory sight, that clean sky and those dirty clouds.

The Force tickled at the back of his head, and Maul stopped, dropping his left hand to his blaster. The metal was cold and smooth, and helped him concentrate as he examined the Force presence that he could sense somewhere nearby. No one was on the path with him, and he could see all the way into the quarry now. That left the caves as a possible source of entry.

It didn't feel like a sentient presence, though. He remembered that Bandomeer was known for dangerous animals.

And he had just landed in the perfect snake pit.

With a scratching, snuffling sound, something burrowed out of the wall next to him. He had time to see a bright green, scaled head and what looked like blue, hexagonal sails before the creature dropped to the pathway and hissed at him. He took one step back, drew the blaster, and fired.

The animal had little chance. He could see that it was a serpentine creature now, thick and short-bodied, with protuberant fangs and four blue sails arranged around its head like puzzle pieces. He could see the purple veins in them, branching. Shot twice in the body, it sank down, its mouth snapping a few times in frenzied attack motions toward him. It could not control the death throes of its body, though, and so the last snap was aimed only at the air as the snake turned belly-up, crushing the sails beneath its own head.

Maul lowered the blaster.

The ground shook. He threw his arms out for support as dirt flew into the air and rocks clattered against each other. Taking one step backward, he Force-jumped to the next switch-back, almost at the top now.

A cavernous-mouthed, bright green snake nose emerged out of the dirt.

This, Maul thought, is why he had mostly seen the tracks of droids.

The bigger snake - mother, father, rival, distant relative of the first? - had blue sails too, all along its back. They flashed and wobbled in the sunlight. The snake's mouth opened, dripping spit or poison, and Maul received an unquestionable Force suggestion that he should dash to his left.

The snake spit up a glob of transparent venom. It hit the path where Maul had been standing and sank into the dirt, turning it black with its wetness.

Maul got off two blaster shots, one which went wide and one which hit the snake just behind its left eye and seemed to burn the skin but not actually faze the animal. Then it spat again, and he dashed back to the place he had stood before. With his metal legs he wouldn't even have to worry if he stepped in acid.

(He would have to stop using them as shields some time...)

He fired again, this time hitting one of the blue sails and striking the snake inside its mouth. It had been mid-spit, and the blaster shot knocked a tooth sideways. The venom leaked down the side of the snake's jaw as it fought with whatever numbness or pain was filling its mouth. The third shot blackened one eye.

Now the creature was furious. It coiled its body, waves of muscle seeming to roll up and down the length of it. Its tail was still somewhere in the ground. Maul could see pebbles jump as that latter half of the body created tiny groundquakes further down the path with its thrashing. He wished he had his lightsaber: it would be so easy just to cleave the thing's skull in two.

Instead he had to dodge as the mouth opened wide, umbrellaing wider than he thought it could, and the green maw filled with red tongue and white stalagmite teeth plummeted toward him. When it landed it just bumped the ground and then sniffed, the blind eye not moving, the other one surely rolling around looking for its prey. Maul wanted to get closer, wanted to rip those delicate looking blue scales right out of the muscle of its back, but he knew that the blaster was much more efficient and could get the job done: he sprayed laster blasts from the thing's mouth to its eye and back. It had been, and was still, silent except for the sniffling of its gigantic nostrils, but he could feel its cries of pain in the Force. With sudden violence, a spasmic type of movement completely different from its blind snuffling of the rocks, it reared upward. Maul saw a section of the bottom of its tail breach the wall further down, spilling another section of the switchback path into the bottom of the quarry.

It retreated, sinking back toward the quarry but unable to return to the hole from whence it had come. The wounded eye caused it too much pain to burrow. Maul wondered how long it would be until the creature could move underground again. The miner droids might have a surprise waiting for them tomorrow.

He shook his head, sighed, and looked at the ammo count on his blaster. He had thirty shots left. That would be enough for a bar brawl, but not enough for a Jedi. And he was beginning to hate this weapon. It was so useless next to a lightsaber.

Maul hunched his shoulders and crested the rise.

He emerged into a cleared plain of rocky ground. Behind him, he could see other quarries, and canyon-lands of mines that had been carved into Bandomeer's surface. The natural lay of the ground looked flat. Perhaps there were mountains somewhere else, but here, the miners had had to create their own topography.

The next lot over was a field, in the grass on the edge of land tilled for crops. It felt like high summer, the heat not quite oppressive but fierce enough that he rolled the sleeves of his tunic up, first right and then left. Although at first glance the field had seemed verdant, he could see now that he examined it more closely that the tall crops were withered and small, the stems and leaves the brittle yellow of parchment when they should probably have been green. Smoke or smog filled up the sky to one side, blocking out half of the sun and probably only increasing the heat. The escape pod had ripped a wide path into the dirt, exposing the bedrock, but right in front of him there was a paved road, one that he hoped would lead him to a city with a spaceport.

After a few steps he turned, looking back down at the white escape pod with its blue cushion deflating behind it like spilled guts. Would it be better to destroy it, so that the jailers would not come looking for him? Would they even bother? More importantly, if Sidious did, the Sith Lord would be able to track his wayward apprentice easily through the Force whether or not the escape pod remained in its ruined state. The idea of crawling back down into the pit made his lip curl. Maul left the escape pod behind.

The first sign that Maul was nearing a city was the dirt and wreckage along the side of the road: a speeder bumper here, a spilled and torn trash bag there, the road becoming wider and more clearly marked even as the edges became more broken up, and Maul started having to step over chunks of tarmac in the dirt. There were no slidewalks, and not even concrete walkways. He passed a few people, pale aliens with hair of a bright gold that seemed to stand out like a sore thumb on their brown planet. They looked haggard, but also looked up at him as he approached. It said something about a place if the natives were willing to meet strangers' eyes.

Some of them raised their hands and said hello, but he did not answer. He wished that his tunic had a hood he could raise, but he had not prioritized gaining the uniform of the Sith when he had been on Mandalore. He nodded at the occasional Meerian passerby who looked like they might look at him twice. They always decided against it after catching his eyes.

Maul noticed quickly that he had been lucky to land where he did. The farm was a rarity, and clearly struggling to survive. If the escape pod had landed one hundred meters to the left or right, it would have fallen into even deeper pits or mines, perhaps occupied by even nastier creatures.

The Bandomeer town he came across a few miles down the roadway was large, but it squatted alone in the farmland around it. Buildings the beat-up brown color of the dirt sat hunched over the streets crowded with speeders. Maul quickly noticed a variety of cantinas. A popular chain of diners seemed to have taken the green snake creature as its logo. If there was a spaceport, it was clearly not on this side of the city.

There should be an information kiosk, somewhere. He shouldered through an unusually thick crowd of passerby, only to find them watching a video of a newscaster talking about mining operations. In contrast to the demographics of the beings he had seen on the road, this crowd was mostly human, with the brightly-colored head of hair of a Meerian showing here and there between the humans as its owner craned his or her neck to see over the taller beings.

The mining video didn't contain anything that had much relevance to him, Maul thought. He felt some recognition, though, some deja vu, and peered more closely at the images of lifter droids conveying black rocks up into red-hot smelting chambers. The newscaster superimposed in 2-D over the grainy image was a blonde-haired Cathar woman. Nothing about her slitted eyes or short, striped fur was familiar.

The name of the planet was, though. Maul peered at the Aurebesh text at the bottom of the screen. _Orsis._ He had trained there, at an academy for mercenaries, when he was very young -

The crowd had molded comfortably around him now. Enough pedestrians had stopped that only the people on the outside of the groups were getting glares from those who hadn't. There was in fact less arguing than Maul would have expected, but then, he was used to hurried, crowded Coruscant.

He chose a person standing next to him, a tall human woman who didn't look like she would startle. Maul caught the woman's eyes and then looked toward the screen. "What's happening?"

"InterGalactic Ore is moving some operations to Orsis. Karking great for them, but might not go so kriffing well for us."

"Huh," Maul said.

_Orsis._

"I need to get to the spaceport."

The woman looked quizzically at him, and Maul wondered whether she would answer the unspoken question. Maybe she would be too caught up in whatever economic ramifications the InterGalactic Ore news was going to have on her.

"It's on the other kriffing side of town." The woman didn't sound perturbed. "Take this road to Kalor Street."

Maul nodded and left her.

Getting out of the crowd was time-consuming, but beyond that, the walk was easy. Maul's mechanical legs were functioning acceptably, only occasionally listing, and his blaster didn't draw any suspicion. Many people here, of varying species and genders, carried either similar weapons or heavy axes and hammers probably used in mining.

Where was he going?

Down this sidewalk, sure. One foot in front of the other, looking straight ahead instead of at the crowds on either side. There, a girl smoking a death stick. There, that green snake logo above a diner on a corner. There, a driver honking at a traffic light as someone else in a small, beat-up speeder cut him off. Maul wanted a mission. He itched for one, and the mentions of InterGalactic or and Orsis, both entities with which he had tangled before, didn't help. How did people live like this? He was hungry too, and since he had been living off of Death Watch hospitality and the credits stashed in his and Savage's stolen ship, the easiest way to procure food would be to steal it. That was bound to have complications, though, if he was loud and someone caught him.

He had trained on Orsis. He had had friends there, before Sidious had taught him that he was destined to only leave them behind.

He hadn't left Savage behind, though, not really.

The spaceport was small. He saw the domed landing pads peeking out from behind the other buildings of the city - he still did not know its name - before he was sure he was on the right road. The turn off to the spaceport was clear. He hesitated outside one of the diners with the snake logo before opening the door.

The smell of the food was mouth-watering. Something was frying on a grill. The diner was clean and brightly lit, with only a few humans and a few Ithorians occupying the spindly tables. The girl behind the counter was a Meerian, with silvery hair and wearing a baggy shirt under an equally baggy apron.

He picked up a menu off of the counter. In small text on the back, it explained that the chain's logo was the sun snake because it exemplified beauty, grace, and, in myth, had warmed lost travelers with the heat that it absorbed through the sails on its back.

It didn't seem likely that he would find spacers here.

He shoved the front door open just in time to see the woman he had talked to in front of the news broadcast walking toward the spaceport. She had dark skin and black hair fading to gray. Her chin and neck were wrinkled with weight and age, but she didn't look elderly - probably fifty. She wore a blue flightsuit with black trappings, and didn't appear to be carrying a weapon or expressing anything besides slightly grumpy acknowledgement of the world around her.

The human did not glance back when Maul fell into step behind her. Maul reached out to tap her on the shoulder, but did not want to frighten her - he had no idea what this woman _was_ , but it was possible that she had a spaceship. It was also possible that she was a provincial miner who had never been off world, but Maul didn't know.

The woman ignored him. Maul quickened his pace and looked her in the eyes when he got a chance. What was he supposed to say here? 'Hey you?' 'Excuse me?' This person was not a Force-user. She only deserved a certain measure of formality and respect.

Luckily, the woman made the first comment. "Are you kriffing following me?"

"I am looking for the space port."

"Yeah, you told me. And I told you." She shrugged.

_I'm hungry,_ Maul thought, but he wasn't going to say that. "Do you have a ship?"

"Who are you?" The woman stopped, leaving Maul backed against the wall of the chain diner.

Maul spread his hands. He was not good at supplication, but he had a feeling that she wouldn't like to learn, suddenly, that she was talking to a Sith Lord or a mercenary. "I'm a freelancer. I landed on this planet without anything, and need to leave it."

She looked at him suspiciously. Maul rankled: he hated asking for help. Maybe he could just threaten her. That would work better.

"A freelance _what?"_

_Bounty hunter, assassin, psychic,_ Maul thought. _I could slam her against the wall and force her to take me to her ship. But there are police in this city, there are crowds and crowds of miners, and -_

His stomach growled.

Some of the suspicion faded from the woman's eyes.

"I need to get to Orsis," Maul said. "One planet. One stop."

Her eyes narrowed again. She looked back and forth along the street for help. "Do you want some caf or something?"

Maul nodded.

They went back into the store with the snake logo. The woman ordered him a caf and a sandwich thick with meat, bread, and beans.

"It's hard to grow anything above the kriffing ground here. And as soon as you start, they kriffing dig the ground out from under you." She sat down with a smaller sandwich in her hand.

She talked nearly non-stop.

Her name was Kasen. Maul had not yet determined whether she was a spacer or not, but miner seemed more likely from the way she talked. Maybe she was an out-of-work miner, her job taken by the droids. That would explain the anger. She talked like she was planning on wearing her lungs out before the rock dust could eat them.

"The Republic won't help, the Hutts won't help, and it's not their kriffing fault - what InterGalactic Ore gives, InterGalactic takes away, you know? It's not like we didn't love their kriffing mining droids before they started taking over every inch of the place and practically driving us into the ocean. One chancellor is just like another one out here, mate. And Governess Rava just sits in her kriffing palace and eats up her family's money like her father and his father have done since the planet kriffing formed out of the primordial dirt."

"You are a miner?"

"Yeah. I came here to make my fortune. You ever notice how no one ever says that in the present tense? Ah yes, here I am making my fortune _right now._ No one says that. You know why not? Because they don't _talk_ to the people who never made it."

Maul said, "Do or do you not have a ship?"

She moved her sandwich around in her mouth and swallowed dramatically. "What did you say you do again?"

_So she's hiding something, just like I am. Or is only willing to take information like an eye for an eye._

Maul still hadn't seen any weapons on her, which probably meant that she didn't have any. There wasn't even a bulge in her boot.

"I am a mercenary."

"I had a feeling so." Kasen chewed. "I have a ship."

Maul wanted to lurch forward, wanted to grab her by her lapels and order her to grant him command of her ship. He almost did. The table rattled. Even after all the abuse he had put them through, his mechanical legs still worked naturally.

Kasen must have seen the anger in his face, because she leaned back slightly, not fearful so much as suddenly quizzical about why Maul was so passionate about getting off the planet. A mercenary might see this as just another opportunity, he thought. A mercenary might be laissez-faire, might take it as a chance to make friends.

Maul could only act for so long before he got tired of pretending.

"I'll take you one way," Kasen said. "But you have to do something for me in return."

"What?" Maul tipped his head.

"I don't know," Kasen said. "Clean the hyperdrive, do the kriffing dishes or something. We'll work it out on the way."

Maul nodded.


	3. Chapter 3

Maul saw the likely cause of Kasen's charity as soon as he walked onto the small ship. The vehicle was a freighter, cross-shaped, with the bridge before and the ramp behind, living facilities on one side and storage on the other. It was remarkably plain. Like nearly everything else that Maul had seen since the sides of the jail ship came into view, it was dull brown in color.

The inside, though, was a chaos of red and blue decorations that appeared to have a religious significance. A tapestry of a six-armed, dragon-headed goddess was hung on one wall above a rickety table holding candles and beads set on top of a thin, gold-flecked, dark green cloth.

Kasen just glanced at it as Maul walked in. "You'll be bunking in the living room. The couch has seen better days, but, I gather so have you."

Maul felt like he should be putting a bag down, but he had nothing. He also felt like he should be killing this woman, attacking her and taking her ship the instant the launch codes had been typed in - but why? Maul was so used to secrecy because Sidious' life was secret. Maul's did not have to be. He had gained a certain measure of notoriety among the Mandalorians and the Death Watch, but that conflict, as massive in scope as it had seemed to Obi-Wan Kenobi and the others involved, had been tiny on the galactic scale and only affected a certain demographic of people. Maul knew that the galaxy at large confused Death Watch with Mandalorians or the other way around and probably couldn't name anything about either except that they had once, and perhaps did not any more, wear functional armor.

Kasen was not a liability because there was no one for her to tell anything _to._ Sidious clearly did not care whether Maul lived or died. Maul wouldn't have been entirely surprised or unsatisfied if Sidious, in the tradition of the Sith, had wanted his once-apprentice dead, but the Sith Lord had shown his apathy to be even greater than that on the jail ship. Sidious truly didn't differentiate, or he would have killed Maul himself instead of tossing him into a situation that was as likely to end in chaos and death on the jail ship than in Maul's immediate demise.

What a gulfing apathy that would be. All that Sith power and planning. Sidious planned _everything._ There had never been any room in that dejarik-master brain to _not_ care about something.

Until now.

That fact worried Maul more and more as he stopped pushing back at it, as he looked into the empty space between two of the dragon goddess's upraised arms.

"Have you heard of Ralima?" Kasen said.

Maul shook his head.

"Kriffing good goddess she is. Doesn't outlaw anything that isn't wrong. She doesn't have her eye turned to one kriffing mining planet right now though." She sighed.

"She doesn't mind you swearing, does she?"

Kasen laughed in a short burst. "I'm not karking taking _her_ name in vain. Those other words belong to somebody else."

Maul nodded. "I see."

"Settle down. The bridge isn't big enough for two. Put the transceiver on if you want. There's probably somebody screaming about InterGalactic Ore that has some interesting analysis." She turned away to head to the bridge. The small door leading in that direction was draped with rust-red beads that looked like the same kind as on the alter.

"You said you wanted me to do something for you in return."

Kasen stopped, turned half way away. "Yeah. I'll figure it out. It takes, what, two days to get to Orsis?" She let the silence linger for just two heartbeats before giving a stronger indication that she wanted actual feedback from Maul. She, Maul realized, assumed that the Zabrak knew where he was going. "What?"

"Two days," Maul parroted. That sounded right.

He would need to kill _something_ after this. The lack of direction was beginning to infect him. Soon his thoughts would get fuzzy and all he would be able to _do_ was parrot.

Until he had a mission again. Whether that mission lasted for months or weeks or the time it took to fight a wild beast away from his throat didn't matter.

"I'll figure it out," Kasen said.

* * *

 

As it turned out, Kasen did figure it out. She had not been exaggerating about putting her passenger to work washing the dishes: her food processor, she said, had broken a long time ago, so the galley was primitive. She had a sonic scrubber but no dish washer, so Maul hosed down the dirtied dishes after the five fully-home-made meals they had together. The trip did indeed take two days. Kasen's eating schedule was almost like clockwork, except that on the second day she slept in, seemingly having over the one night previous gained the confidence to believe that her guest would not murder her in her sleep.

Kasen prayed once a day, in the evening, casually pushing the rickety alter aside (it looked like it had been set up on a sabacc table that had not been intended for use on a spaceship - most of her furniture was, unusually, not bolted down - ) and opening a drawer at the base of the Ralima statue. From the drawer she took a small, dedicated datapad and meditated on the text within. The meditations were short, lasting no more than a few seconds. Maul was still curling his lip at them by the time the ship began orbiting Orsis.

Throughout the trip, Kasen talked almost constantly, but said remarkably little about her own past. She said in passing that she had a sister, and also referred to going home to see her family for a week-long holiday that Maul had never heard mentioned before. Other than that, her conversations were mostly about the Orsis-Bandomeer situation and how it affected InterGalactic Ore's various other holdings and her own business.

The ship didn't appear to have any mining equipment on it, or space for such. The engines rumbled nearby as Maul slept on the couch just to the side of the statue of Ralima, and the section where Kasen slept was, if Maul's assessment of the ship's size from the outside had been correct, a space hardly larger than a couch itself, located on the opposite side of the kitchen.

During the days Kasen listened to the transmissions she had talked about, although in hyperspace she had to make do with recorded ones that would be a day or two out of date now. She seemed to live, breathe, and eat the _idea_ of mining without actually doing any. Nor was it an academic interest: Kasen was more likely to rattle off a list of types of ore and what machines were used to dig them up than to talk about the socio-political factors among the people and businesses that used Bandomeer's soil. Kasen thought about the planet before the people, but not in an environmentalist way. She had the mind of someone who worked with her hands, not a pundit.

On the other hand, she didn't seem to be affiliated with any company or to have a job that she found worth talking about. She didn't even complain about her circumstances specifically, although once Maul found her muttering about what it cost to put fuel in the tanks. Maybe Ralima was one of those deities that encouraged helping others at the expense of oneself.

Kasen hadn't seemed to notice that Maul had mechanical limbs, or if so, hadn't mentioned it. It wasn't an unusual thing to have prosthetic legs, not even two, especially among a society in which a lot of people worked for industries involving human interaction with large, dangerous, low-tech machinery. The fact that the prosthetic extended up past Maul's hips was unusual, but Kasen never found herself in a circumstance where she would notice that.

Maul finally brought Kasen's occupation up as a conversation topic one day when the human was sitting a pillow she had taken from the couch, sipping from a cup of caf on the evening of the first day.

Maul was sitting on the couch. He had stayed there for most of the trip, sometimes meditating and sometimes also listening to the transmissions that so entertained Kasen, pretending that he understood more than he did and learning what he could.

"It doesn't look like you could _mine_ much using this ship," Maul said.

"I used to be a miner," Kasen replied. "Back then I had a bigger ship. But I sold it. I kriffing told you, ExtraGalactic Ore bought out all the little guys."

She hadn't told him that in such precise terms, but Maul nodded.

"I'm between jobs now. I pick up freelance things here and there but everything's either taken by droids or somebody's nephew or InterGalactic's crack team of Being Resources barves. They've got excluding honest workers down to a science."

"Do you have a family?"

"My daughter is in school on Alderaan. My son lives with his father."

The intricacies of divorce were of profound disinterest to Maul; he had simply wanted to know exactly how desperate Kasen was. Not desperate enough to not go out of her way for a lost traveller, apparently, maybe because she only had one mouth to feed most of the time.

There was a silence that could have been interpreted as awkward if either one of them had shown more interest in continuing the discussion. Kasen did, but with an air of boredom. "What about you? Family?"

Maul shook his head.

"And..."

Maul shrugged.

Kasen narrowed her eyes again. She was suspicious of Maul's label as 'mercenary,' he knew.

However, she had let Maul carry a blaster into his ship. Maul had barely thought about that until he was lying awake, sensing that Kasen was asleep in the other room, and he had put the blaster under the alter to the goddess just to have somewhere to set it that wasn't out in the crowded open. Kasen didn't seem to have a weapon. Maybe she couldn't afford one.

They still had this cordial standoffishness between them when Kasen brought the ship out of hyperspace and into a low orbit around the planet Orsis. The surface of the planet had more varied shapes and colors than Maul had expected, although he remembered such varied areas as jungles, lava plains, and ocean shores from during his time training there. The planet had scattered continents, with the largest showing a blob of green forest next to a similar-sized blob of brown desert.

"Where exactly to you want to go on this kriffing lump of dirt?" Kasen said. She had been looking around nervously at the stars, and as Maul edged into the crowded bridge he saw why. Just over Kasen's left shoulder he saw a two-dimensional screen showing what other ships were in the area, and four large vehicles were labeled with the words "InterGalactic Ore." It was funny, Maul thought, that he was going to have another run-in with them. He did not doubt that Kasen would find some way to get him in trouble with the mining company before the day was through - that was how missions tended to go whenever Maul deigned to get another person involved. He would know all about this planet in a matter of days.

Every time he blinked it was as if he switched between looking at Orsis with adult eyes and looking at it with child's eyes.

Maul did not have any great fondness for the Orsis Academy, but he had done a lot of learning and a lot of growing up there. It had been one of the first places, too, in which he had actively taken part in Sidious' practice of wiping any trace of Maul's presence in the galaxy out of existence. The galaxy was a big place if someone really wanted to hide, but it was remarkable how many people who wanted to hide frequented the common stomping grounds for criminals, like Nal Hutta or Coruscant.

Instead of taking risks and potentially getting the highly communicative galactic criminal underworld talking, Sidious had simply ordered Maul to kill everyone in the Academy.

So that was what he had done.

"There are the ruins of a training academy on the shore of the eastern sea." Maul pointed, nearly shoving Kasen's shoulder in the process. "You will see a perimeter fence, if it is still standing."

"How long ago were you here?"

"A long time."

Kasen scoffed.

"Perhaps ten years."

Was is that long? That short? Maul had committed to memory what year it was, but when he thought back and tried to trace what he had experienced in those intervening years, Lotho Minor still got in the way.

It didn't matter. Kasen wouldn't know enough to correct him. Maybe the fallen walls of the academy would correct them both. How much overgrowth could grow in ten years?

"Whatever. Did you just kriffing point at the planet and tell me to land there? I need coordinates. We've gotta go through kriffing clouds and drek."

Maul sighed, but very quietly.

Kasen didn't seem to notice. Instead she changed the small 2-D screen to a more complex map of the planet. She pressed buttons, swiping through different views until she found one that showed the numbers pinpointing what she thought might be the right location. "Look, barve, if we come down right here we can go along the coast until you see your kriffing perimeter fence. You sure you don't want go to a city, or something? Some nice diner?"

"Yes."

"Do you expect me to wait for you here?"

"No."

Maul was not actually sure how he expected to get off Orsis, but it didn't matter. He could survive a good long time in this woods. He knew. He had done it as a teenager.

And there was something he needed to find here. The fact that he didn't know what it was exactly may or may not have meant that it didn't want to be found.

Without any other mission, he had all the time in the world.

"Take me to the place I pointed out."

"I'm not sure you've washed enough dishes for this, barve."

Maul did not reply to that. The bridge was small and cramped, so he left.

A few minutes later, Kasen yelled for him to come back and look out of the viewport. The ship had broken the cloud layer and was soaring over a beach on a blue-sky day. The jungle on the other side of the narrow, sandy shore was tangled and deep, the plants mostly a dark green with the occasional purple or orange flower poking up like a gaudy neon advertisement. "Does this look karking familiar enough for you?" Kasen said.

"Not yet," Maul said.

Kasen almost repeated the words. Maul saw her rolling them around in her cheeks.

Maul was beginning to become unhappy with Kasen's impatience. The Zabrak leaked anger into the Force, but it was no good: Kasen could not feel it. There would be no satisfaction there. Again, Maul considered killing the woman and taking her ship. But part of him did not want it to be easy for him to leave Orsis. He had to do something here. It was something best done once he was out from under the staring eyes of the many-armed goddess. Let Kasen go back to her mundane life, to the bills she paid and the out-of-work miners whose company she was probably more accustomed to hosting.

He saw a conning tower rising up out of the jungle and almost slammed his hand into Kasen's shoulder. He only stopped himself because her hand was on the yoke. "There," Maul growled.

Kasen didn't hesitate to reply. "I'm gonna have to put down on the beach, because I don't exactly see a landing pad around here."

"There were."

The landing pads, Maul knew, were actually one of the more intact parts of the academy when last he left it. Sidious had picked him up there.

Kasen's ship had by this time passed the conning tower. The human brought them in over the jungle for a view of the place. It looked overgrown in parts, and the outline of the wall was barely visible over all the plants that had climbed over it, using it to hoist themselves closer to the large, yellow sun. There were signs of recent habitation, too, and as soon as Maul saw them he knew that his idea of a mediative visit focused on his past (was that what he was here to do? was he looking backward?) would not come easy. There were two pre-fab buildings and a machine almost as large as them, with a scoop on one side and a drill on the other. In a clearing between the prefab buildings, Maul could also see small, silver metallic shapes that could either be droids or simply accumulated supplies or piles of trash. Someone was scouting out the site.

"Blast it. Someone's already here." Kasen sounded surprisingly level as she brought the ship back around to the beach. "They've probably seen us."

"If they have scanners," Maul cautioned her.

"They could just kriffing look up. They probably heard the engines. I thought you said this place was deserted."

"Put down on the beach."

"I bet those are InterGalactic Ore guys scouting this out as a place to put a mine."

"I said that you didn't have to have anything to do with my..." Maul hesitated. His mission? His what? "...time here."

Kasen swore again, this time harsher. "Yeah. And hey, I can confirm that karking news report."

"Land."

"Don't get so huffy about it."

Maul nearly growled at her.

As the ship hovered over the beach, Maul began to sense some hesitation. He had drifted back into the corridor from the living quarters to the bridge, but now stomped back. Kasen told him what was wrong before he asked.

"I don't think I can do it."

Maul tipped his head. "Do what."

"The landing. The sand is too...sandy."

It would be so easy for Maul to just raise his fist and hit her. Kasen had probably seen something to that effect in Maul's expression, because she aimed the ship back out at the waves and looked back at her passenger. "Look, this ship has narrow little legs." She gestured with her hands for emphasis. "It's good for landing on landing pads, tarmac surfaces. I could even do crowded city streets. My old ship, now that had special legs for landing on rocky surfaces. Such as mines." She was clearly talking to Maul as if the Zabrak was a child, and hamming it up too. "But I can't _afford_ that any more. We have to put down on the landing pad or else I'll sink in and flop over and fall into the sea."

Seemingly affronted by her own dramatic telling, Kasen sat back in her seat from where she had been leaning and gesturing dramatically.

"You said you could do this," Maul said.

"I thought you were going to a _city!_ Like a...kriffing...city person."

"Then set down on the landing pad."

 _It will be harder for you to leave than for me, now,_ Maul thought.

"I don't know, bro. What am I going to tell them? 'Yeah I'm just dropping this barve off, he doesn't know where he's going and didn't tell me, I just work here?' Except," she added as an aside, "I don't because you took all the jobs."

"I'll jump down. Open the ramp."

"Are you sure?" Kasen said flatly. "Also, that is not going to be much more subtle."

"Do it."

"They might see me. There are security forces out here, even if we can't see them - "

The endless circling had finally gotten to Maul. His fondness for Kasen was wearing off. "Do it!" He gripped her shoulder, and leaned down. "Would you rather I _crash_ the ship?"

"What?"

Maul grabbed Kasen's neck, pressing against her jugular with his forearm. "Open the ramp."

"It's there...it's there." She struggled, pointing toward a lever on the other side of the cockpit. It would have been easy for her to reach over if Maul wasn't keeping her pinned to the chair from behind.

Maul had a momentary flash of vision: not precognition, although maybe a tinge of the Force warning him of betrayal. He simply imagined what might happen if he let Kasen go. Kasen might move toward the lever and then push back, attacking, wasting precious time -

And part of Maul wanted to let her.

"Are you kriffing serious? You'll die if you jump out -" Kasen said.

But it was so much faster for Maul to just flip the switch with the Force. He heard the _chunk_ of metal separating from metal behind him, beyond the room where he had slept, and red lights sprouted up all over the console as the ramp lowered into thin air too fast for the pressure inside and outside the ship to stabilize. He heard more crashing sounds as things inside the living area - maybe the alter - fell over.

Maul said, "Good."

He released Kasen's neck.

As soon as he did, she turned around, livid. Maul backed the few steps out of the bridge, waiting to see if Kasen would do anything. The most foolish move she could make would be to close the ramp.

"Kark it, get out, you crazy barve," Kasen said. "See if I care if you break your neck."

Maul stomped across the living room, securing his blaster more tightly to his waistband as he went. "You're a terrible dishwasher anyway!" Kasen yelled from behind him.

A moment later, as Maul reached the ramp and the wind started swirling around him from the speed and the engines, Kasen started to follow him. Maul heard the footsteps, sensed the woman's fear. She was too nice, Kasen was. She worried too much. Maybe she wasn't corrupt enough to be a Bandomeer miner.

"Listen, I'd rather land than you kriffing threaten to kill yourself - wait! The kriff did I get myself into?"

The ship was over the ocean. Orsis was a prettier planet than Bandomeer, at least right now: the sun, slightly larger than Bandomeer's but the same yellow color, was shining over the calm, blue ocean. The ship was on a straight course perhaps one hundred feet from the beach, probably not out past the continental shelf.

Maul stomped down the ramp and launched himself into the air, gathering the Force around him as he did.

Air rushed around him. It was disorienting that the blue horizon didn't appear to be moving, but then the sound of Kasen's ship's engines rushed past him. A few seconds later Maul could sense the surface of the water. He curved the surface of the sea like it was a bowl, the waves frothing white at the tops.

He wished that he could just fly over the surface. For a moment, he tried. But that was not one of the capabilities of the Force. Instead he dropped gently into the ocean just as the rounded top of a newly forming wave was lifting up the entire bowl of water, which propelled him another tiny distance toward the shore. The water was cold, and the salt stung his eyes where it splashed from both his landing and the natural waves. He started to kick toward shore.

Kasen's ship trawled across the sky overhead. The fact that it was already moving probably meant that Kasen had gone back to the bridge. She would see Maul swimming, would see him climb up on shore if she waited long enough. Then she could leave Maul alone.

The Zabrak was halfway to the beach, soaked through, when he realized how much he was struggling against the weight of his legs. He had buoyed himself up with the Force for some time, but then had naturally relaxed it: and now he felt himself starting to sink toward the sea floor. It was only about twenty feet down now, what should have been a simple swim, but his legs were nearly solid metal.

This would not be a rightful place to die.

Maul growled, but he was weakening, and water sloshed up against his face. He took a deep breath, wondered if he could move the water around him with the Force. He tried, but it was under too much pressure and not solid enough for him to get the mental equivalent of a grip on the particles that comprised it.

The water covered his mouth, filling it with the taste of brine and fish. This, Maul thought, had been a terrible idea.


	4. Chapter 4

Kasen was telling him how terrible an idea it had been when he woke up.

"You _idiot._ Did you see what just happened there? We had to fish you out of the ocean with a _magnet._ An InterGalactic Ore Combine Ore-Tex 785 Magnetic Crane. That costs _money."_

The idea that Kasen had said 'we' floated through Maul's groggy brain even before he got surprised that the miner was still around. There were other people in the room, three of them, wearing overalls and goggles. He groaned.

"What do you remember?" said an old woman's voice. When Maul focused, he could see that one of the people wearing goggles was an elderly, orange-skinned Nikto. She held herself authoritatively, with squared shoulders and a level gaze, and judging by her age and the yellow badge on her coverall, she probably was.

Maul sat up before he bothered answering her.

"I left you. I fell into the sea."

_More importantly, I came to Orsis to find my past._

Nearly drowning had knocked that certainty into him. He was here because he needed to find something, or learn something, or resolve something. The fact that he didn't know what it was or whether it was a physical or mental thing frightened him, but he was used to fear. He could swim in fear more easily than he could swim in the ocean.

He remembered drowning.

The water had still been blue, the sun filtering far, far down, so that he had been able to see the bubbles kicked up by his arms as he flailed, clawing at the expanse of water as he tried to get back to the surface. He could kick his legs, but they seemed to get heavier and heavier as the metal pieces kept dragging him down. It had taken far too long. For a few minutes, he had been able to sustain his blood-oxygen count simply by slowing his heart rate and brain, falling into something that was half meditation and half unconsciousness, swirling the Force around at the edge of his through just so that he remembered it was there when he began to forget everything else. His lungs tensed up, painfully spasmed, and seized.

Drowning had been worse than being rebuilt by the Nightsisters.

But, then as now, he had been resurrected.

"We've treated you for lack of oxygen," the Nikto woman said. "You're lucky your friend came back for you."

Maul glanced at Kasen without moving his head.

"Are you a Jedi or something?" Kasen said, sounding shocked. "The way you moved that water..."

The Nikto looked between them, waiting for some kind of response. Maul didn't want to give one until he knew what exactly Kasen had told her about their arrival.

He recognized the logos on the miners' coveralls now too: InterGalactic Ore. Kasen had set down a nest of her enemies - or at least a nest of people she resented - when she had seen that Maul had sank into the sea and not come back up.

Maul sighed and sat up. He still felt groggy and weak. He had been relying on other people far too much lately, though. When he stood, his legs were steady. Some of the miners moved back on limbs that looked shakier than his.

'I have come here to visit this site," Maul said. "Do not obstruct my plan."

The Nikto was taken aback. "Your friend said you were pretty single-minded about getting here. Can you tell me why?"

Maul flashed her a disdainful look.

"This is a preparatory outpost. We don't do any mining. But you're liable to fall down a hole or be eaten by something."

Maul didn't even shrug. The two miners let him pass them, out into a short white hallway in a prefab building that probably served as the InterGalactic agents' medical center. Behind him, though, he heard the Nikto and Kasen arguing.

Maul kept going.

Outside, he saw Kasen's ship on a small round landing pad, and short cleared paths between the prefab buildings. The landing pad was the only paved area. The metal chunks he had seen from the sky were indeed droids, one of them inactive now and one of them seemingly slowly sniffing the ground with a round metal detector pad.

His legs did not seem to be compromised by their stint in the water. He snarled at himself, wishing for one of the first times that he still had his organic legs. It was funny how he had more to worry about than the fact that parts of his body had been replaced.

The water had done something to his lungs too: his breathing felt shallow, but not debilitating. He walked into the jungle, brushing wide-leaved plants away and reaching out with the Force to sense any predators before they arrived. The voices he could hear behind him prickled just like they did in the Force. Would Kasen leave? Maul would have to deal with that later.

His fists curled almost automatically. He hadn't had a straight fight in too long.

Very soon, even the jungle didn't fight back any more. Leaves with sharp edges smacked him and let off exotic, cloying smells when their edges split. The ground was rocky, and trip-wired with thick vines and knee-high clumps of grass that were almost solid. Maul raised his arms like he was going to box someone. The jungle ended soon, though, spitting him out onto a gentle slope of black dirt that lead to a severe cliff at the edge of the ocean.

His boots crunched on the dirt, the tiny brown-black rocks at the edge of the slope down to the sea. This could have been the same place where he went swimming with Kilindi Motoko, or where the instructors took a whole group of trainees out past the continental shelf and told them about how to face their fears. (Perspective, that was the answer. Look at how big the sea is, how much of it is going about its own business as opposed to furthering your problem. Perspective and lots and lots of kicking.)

He knew that it was really a completely different section of coast, though, perhaps not even connected geographically. It could be a different sea. Maul did not know. He hadn't known how to fly spaceships when he went to the Orsis training facility as a teenager. He had known how to drive speeders, and how to read space navigational charts, but had not yet put the two skills together.

Kilindi Motoko. The name brought up a host of sense-memories: the smell of the dirt outside the trainees' barracks, perhaps the same pushed up from the sea next to him; the rusty color of her tunic, the faces of his other friends.

Their blood, too, the whites of their eyes when he killed them, but those scenes were associated with smells as of fire, and now he was by the sea.

Why did the jungle not grow at this outcropping, he wondered? He kicked at the surface of the dirt with his toe and felt bedrock underneath. Small chips of dirt fell away, revealing quartzy silver and tan underneath. That explained it. The overhang of the cliff was likely smattered with lichen. Life found a place for itself, no matter its nature.

Then he noticed the square blocks of paving stone under his feet. This wasn't bedrock: it was a floor. He remembered the hunks of grass in the jungle, which might actually have been grass that grew over the remains of a wall. The ground around the mining outpost did look clear, even though only the landing pad was paved.

Maybe this _was_ the academy. It had had a long time to overgrow. Maybe he hadn't been crazy to think that the curve of the beach, even changed as it was by tides and storms, looked familiar.

Kilindi had been one of his first allies, before Savage, before Kasen. She had helped to guarantee some of his victories.

Maybe if he went to the Nautolan people he would find a direction. Kilindi had been pragmatic and fierce. Her family might be similar.

(He had no sense of recompense, of approaching the people whose daughter he had killed in order to apologize for that action. Instead, he worked to find what was best for himself. He had killed her impartially, after all. He did not regret following that order. Now, perhaps, he would have judged the merits or problems of preserving an ally's life over that of his Master. Savage, for example. Maul would rather that his brother had not been killed. Savage had brought him direction, had brought him, however unintentionally, a new people - the Nightsisters, the Mandalorians - to fight.

And Maul did not feel any attachment to Dathomir. Those were Savage's people, not his own. Mother Talzin had simply been a resting place for Maul. Then, after Lotho Minor, he had been in no place to have a say in things, and she, knowing that, had treated him like an animal. He did not hate her for that.

He turned and went back to the jungle.

When he got back, Kasen and the Nikto were calling for him. "Hey! You!"

"What's his name?" the Nikto asked.

"I didn't ask! Hey! You! Jedi"

As soon as Maul emerged from the foliage, they waved. Neither of them moved closer, though, and Maul could sense suspicion from both of them. Suspicion was a shaky emotion to detect, layered as it was with simpler ones like anger and loyalty. Suspicion, though, could be easily detected if you thought of it as betrayal turned inside out.

Maul marched up to the two beings. "I am no Jedi."

"You certainly answered to it.

Maul snarled. "There are more kinds of being in the galaxy than you understand. I need to go to Glee Anselm."

"Where have you been?"

Maul inclined his head toward the desert.

Kasen skipped that gesture and replied again to what Maul had said in the first place. Her eyes went wide. "I'm not sure if 'but you just kriffing got here' is an appropriate sentiment right now, but that's what I'm telling you, barve."

"I need to go to Glee Anselm," Maul repeated, using almost the same inflection. Now that he had decided on it it was almost as good as having orders.

"I helped you because I thought it's what Ralima would want me to do. But that's different from becoming your taxi service. I don't have the credits to go all the way across the galaxy," Kasen said. She glanced at the other woman.

"What is your name?" Maul asked her.

"Riet Soo-Ubo," she said. "Site Supervisor. And you are?"

He paused. "Maul."

"Oh. Of course," Kasen said. "Did you wear a lot of black in primary school?"

Maul bared his teeth, but Kasen seemed to have reached the point of no return when it came to taking him seriously. "Riet," Maul said. "You will pay Kasen to go there."

"To Glee Anselm?" Kasen said, and quickly shut up when the Nikto started speaking.

"Why? Glee Anselm is swampy. All of it. There's no mining to be done there."

Kasen shook her head.

"Do you have a ship?" Maul said.

"We take speeders to the city further along the coast," Riet said dismissively.

Maul looked at Kasen.

The human backed away, raising her hands. "Listen, you jumped out of my ship. I saved you once. Glee Anselm is on the other side of the galaxy, and this whole thing is getting a little...weird."

"And Ralima?"

Kasen sighed and lowered her hands, but only to cross them over her chest. She was clearly struggling with his own beliefs, but that was of less interest to Maul than whether he could get this ship now or another one later.

As soon as he stepped toward Kasen, he sensed that Riet had begun to see him as a threat. No more a threat than a bar room brawler, but that was because she did not know what he was a Sith. He glanced aside at her and saw her leathery skinned pulled into a frown. Like Zabraks, Nikro had small horns, but he felt no more biological loyalty to her than he did to Kasen.

The miners had taken his blaster from him. It was probably still in that prefab medical shelter.

He charged forward.

* * *

"It is not easy to lose someone."

Chancellor Palpatine was facing the wide windows of his office when Anakin came in, his back toward the Jedi. Anakin shuffled like the legendary dead.

The war had not finally caught up to him. Anakin could feel that. This other thing that had been lurking behind him had.

He should have known. Precognition - wasn't that one of the traits of the Jedi? Didn't Yoda dictate what his legions of students could and could not do based on what visions he had in his tiny, slatted meditation room? Anakin should have been able to see that this was coming. The injustice of the fact that he couldn't made him curl his hands, flesh-hand and durasteel hand, into fists.

He should have been able to see that Ahsoka was leaving.

He looked up at Palpatine like Anakin had been chastised by his words of solidarity. If the two men were closer, Anakin would have had to look down on the top of the leader of the free galaxy's balding head. As it was, Anakin stood at the base of three velvet-carpeted stairs and looked up toward the chancellor like Palpatine was the god-statue at the head of the temple.

Anakin could still see Ahsoka leaving, her back and her shoulders so thin and familiar, once alien-looking head-tails lying limp against her body, out into a world that killed and enslaved people. He could still sense her distress, but also the terrible, mature calm of her decision. He could still sense Barriss' anger, her lashing out against the council that had raised her. He had spoken to both Obi-Wan and Luminara briefly, but his mind had fogged so that he could only hear the Jedi platitudes that the other Masters may or may not have actually been saying. Maybe they could have been comforting to someone raised in the Temple. (But, Anakin thought, fighting himself - Ahsoka was also raised in the Temple, and the platitudes had meant nothing to her either.)

He stumbled up the stairs like he was more tired than the war had ever made him.

"It is difficult," Palpatine repeated.

"Do you know?" Anakin turned livid, glaring. For a moment even Palpatine seemed like an enemy, his friendliness an affront.

"No." Palpatine turned around. The sun was setting behind him, nearly gone. It had swallowed up Ahsoka but now the lights of Palpatine's office was driving it back. Red light edged Palpatine's face.

Anakin hesitated over the plush chairs. "Why are you even here? It's late. Sir."

"The trial, Anakin. The same reason you are here."

"Oh." That stunned him even if it should have been obvious. He brushed at the chair with his finger just to feel the soft strands of the fibers.

"I am sorry, Anakin." Palpatine moved closed, walking gingerly across the room. He almost seemed afraid, and now his frailty was, instead of an affront, a comfort to Anakin. Anakin had to be strong for this man. Therefore, he could also be strong for himself.

(Even though he would never see Ahsoka again. He would never hear her voice except unexpectedly, maybe, one day when he had almost forgotten it. And he would never quite think of the Jedi the same way again, not after Barriss had so completely snapped and fallen in with the dark side. If she could do that, if she could draw such conclusions, was the Temple safe? Did its philosophy _work?)_

"I know," Anakin said. He pressed a palm against his face, originally intending to lean on his elbow against the chair but then just burying his face in his own hand, feeling the warmth. "I, just don't understand. How could she be so - The council made her go. They were testing her, but she couldn't see that. And she shouldn't have! They tricked her! But they were going to let her back!"

Palpatine sat down opposite him. "You've got it, Anakin. It is not your fault, nor Ahsoka's. The council forced her to this."

Anakin looked up. "Do you think so?"

"They did not intend to, perhaps. They did not intend for this, specific, outcome. But nevertheless..."

Palpatine let that sentiment sit in the air between them. Anakin shook his head, reaching out to the Force for calm. The calmness was there, but it didn't seem to touch all parts of him. A part was still angry, still hurt. And even the heart of the Force held something hot and beating and bloody, something curling out from inside flame. Something with eyes.

The Force had, for Anakin, always been a dragon at the heart of a star's dying supernova. Right now, it was buried deep beneath all the emotions he had accumulated around Ahsoka, resentment, alienation, and patronizing teachings leading, over the five years of her apprenticeship, to respect, teamwork, and friendship.

Anakin sighed, and curled his fist.

"I just don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"Did you speak to Master Kenobi?"

"He doesn't understand," Anakin said, then reconsidered. Obi-Wan had not lost an apprentice, no. He, like many Jedi - like Anakin, he presumed - would only have one. But Obi-Wan had tried. He had made consoling noises, had recited the list of things Jedi as a unit did to comfort themselves - mantras, meditation, beautiful gardens hidden inside the Jedi Temple. "I mean, he tried," Anakin said. "He always tries."

"What do you want from me?" Palpatine asked. Instead of an expression of exasperation and defeat it was instead a powerful plea: Palpatine, Anakin knew was offering him anything it was in the chancellor's power to give to him.

But Anakin didn't know. He shook his head.

Palpatine looked around, as if finding an idea in the thin air. "Tomorrow. We'll go to the opera. I was not planning on having a guest, but they will save a seat. What do you think of Mon Calamari opera?"

"I...was not aware...of that."

"The star of the show is Mali Dabool. Very talented. They swim in a suspended bubble."

"That seems like...a waste of an awful lot of water, sir."

Palpatine chuckled. "You can decide whenever you like. The seat will be yours."

Anakin stood up, feeling dissatisfied with this conversation. The quiet had helped him, but Palpatine's words had just stirred up more thoughts. Had the council been wrong? Anakin did not doubt that they might be. Was Ahsoka wrong? She had been quiet toward him. She had actively run away and jumped off a ledge instead of talking to him. Anakin didn't know enough of what had happened while she was missing from the Temple to put together an accurate picture. Clones had chased her as if she was a criminal.

That meant that he was just left with his anger.

"Thank you, sir. I'll think about that."

"Please do."

Anakin felt Palpatine watching him as he walked out. He did not want to go back to his room in the Temple, with Ahsoka's attached suite empty, but he knew that it would be dangerous to go to Padme's suite at this time of night: there were not many air cabs around the temple, no traffic he could use as cover, no formal event in which he could at least look at her and find some solace in just the existence of her brown eyes and calm words.

It would be a challenge to get out without being detected, though. That would be a way for him to fight without hurting anyone.

Anakin Skywalker took a skycar back to the Jedi Temple. He went to the the Temple's central elevator and rode it down as far as he could, and then found the service elevator and also rode that.

* * *

Darth Maul hit Kasen with a roundhouse punch, swinging far enough out that it almost unbalanced Maul himself. Kasen did not take advantage of that, though, and a bruise blossomed fast on her face as she doubled over. As soon as Maul straightened up from the punch, Riet was right behind him. She had a hammer in her hand, small but metal-tipped. It looked heavy. She swung, and the head of the hammer almost hit Kasen as Maul moved to the left, leaving Riet facing his right shoulder. He backhanded her with a closed fist, and she reeled back but did not drop the hammer. Maul walked toward Kasen's ship, slowly. When Riet and Kasen started to follow him he picked the Nikto up with the Force and tossed her at the human. Both of them landed in a pile meters away, groaning and wounded. Maul could feel Kasen's shock.

Riet shouted into a commlink that she held in a shaking hand while she was still on the ground. It was possible, from the way her leg was cocked, that she had broken her leg or her knee. Maul kept walking. He broke into a run when he sensed the panic beginning to spread around the facility as the other miners realized something was wrong. The sky was still a clear blue. It was hard to imagine that this was the same location as the Orsis Academy he had attended, but Maul felt the same as he left. The Academy had been more ruined than this.

He reached the ship just as beings in uniforms similar to Riet's were emerging out of the prefab buildings, stumbling and uncoordinated. He did not immediately see any weapon more sophisticated than a hammer, although one miner held a silver box that Maul did not recognize but might be a sonic tool designed to shake rock to its constituent pieces.

He jumped to the ship in one Force-assisted leap and felt the fear in the group increase.

_Fear is my ally._

The ship was locked, as Maul had known that it would be. He snarled and balled his hands into fists, wishing he could break in without compromising the life support. A ship this small, this old, this model, whatever had dictated how the back half of it worked, had not put in an air lock.

Instead, there was a security panel on the outside designed to receive a four-digit code. He didn't recognize the model, but there was a panel on the back. Maul popped it off.

A blaster whined, and Maul turned around to see a miner holding what looked like Maul's own weapon that he had stolen from his would be-jailer. Maul reached out his hand, summoned the Force, and grabbed the gun and the man's wrist at the same time.

The wrist broke and the blaster flew toward him. It smacked into his hand, but as soon as he grabbed it he knew he didn't really want it. He was done with this sneaking, done with running. He had no time limit.

He put the blaster back in his belt.

A miner ran around the corner of a building toward him, holding that silver weapon he had seen earlier. He had been right to think that it was a sonic device of some kind. The miner, a fat-faced, red-skinned male Twi'lek with his short lekku held behind him and tied together with thick straps, screamed as he pointed the box toward the escapee. Maul immediately felt his ears start ringing and his muscles loosen. He felt suddenly, rapidly ill. When he tried to walk forward toward the box, the queasiness continued and his eyelids grew heavier over shaking vision.

He summoned the Force again. Immediately the world gained clarity. Maul turned the machine around in its wielder's hands and pointed it toward his face.

He screamed, and Maul could see blood vessels in his face breaking, turning his face first pink and then bruise-dark red. The spasms of the Twi'lek's arms eventually knocked the device away by themselves, and it lay in the dirt while the man backed up, looking at his own hands as if he was seeing horrible visions while blood leaked from under his eyes.

More people were emerging now, crowding Maul. A klaxon started ringing.

_All this to stop one man from leaving a mine_ , Maul thought. _The fight at the Academy was better. Those children were trained. And unlike Kasen, they did not hesitate._

Maul turned to the left just in time to see Riet swing the hammer down toward him. She was shorter than him, but not by much, with a muscular build in even her neck and her hands. He caught her forearm on his and pushed back. She aimed a punch, which he caught and twisted, nearly exposing the back of her neck as the weight of the hammer dragged her down.

When she reared up again it was to aim a more controlled jab with the hammer head at his stomach. Now it looked like she had fought with the weapon before instead of just broken rock with it, but Maul had been in enough fights to know that, especially among non-Force users, it was hard to tell whether any one had experience or not. Force users tended to move in proscribed ways passed down from master to student to student again, and even if they operated under vastly different schools or philosophies he would recognize a stance there, a kick here, a recovery there. Riet could have been a professional martial artist or could have never hit anyone before in her life. He would never know.

He stepped neatly to turn at right angles to her, swiveling his feet. The Nikto reacted quickly and swung again with the hammer, but she had swung wild and wasn't even close enough to force him to move backward.

When she swung again he grabbed her wrist with one hand and punched her in the side of the head with the other. She kicked out, hit his knee, and shouted as her foot jolted against his metal leg. She was wearing durasteel-tipped boots, though: the metals rang against each other, injuring Riet less than Maul wound have hoped.

Instead she hit back, one punch glancing off his arm, the other striking his chest and hurting. He grabbed the hammer. For a moment they struggled: she was strong, with a low center of gravity. She would be hard to unbalance.

He hit her again. The light in her eyes just kept getting flintier.

The hammer had a pike on the opposite end, for smashing rocks. He hooked a chunk of her clothing with the pike and then felt it tear into her stomach. Now Riet gasped, pushed away, jerked once like a fish on a line. She fell away bleeding. Maul held the bloodied hammer up and pulled his blaster with the other hand when he sensed more people coming around the side of the buildings.

One of them had brought a vehicle, a two-legged robot with the pilot squished tightly inside. Maul threw the hammer, backed its flight with the Force. It broke through the cockpit and into the driver's skull.

He shot twice with the blaster in no particular direction, just to get the other miners to back up, before returning to the casing of the security pad. He tossed the casing aside and tore out the wires inside the pad that his Master had taught him about.

A light on the door glowed green, and the ramp began descending.

Judging by Kasen's lack of security measures here, the bridge wouldn't pose much of a challenge either. Maul had stepped one foot inside the ship when Kasen emerged from behind a building.

The mech was still stomping forward, the corpse hanging limp in the chair.

"I did you a favor!" Kasen yelled.

"Maybe the reason you aren't a good businesswoman is that you think people will return your favors," Maul said, and gestured with the Force. He flung Kasen against the side of the mech, stunning her.

The mech plodded toward her while the human lifted herself up off of the ground and groaned, her eyes fixed with sudden horror upon Riet's body. She seemed fixated on it for a moment. Maul used that moment to step further inside the ship and find the button to close the door from the inside. He watched the mech plod slowly toward the disoriented Kasen. The human had almost fainted. Her eyes were very while, the irises trying to hide behind her brows even as Kasen lolled, arms swaying, trying fruitlessly to motivate her flagging brain to get up and move toward the mining camp's fallen leader.

The mech was striding thoughtlessly across the ground. The pilot must have fallen, or gotten his death grip on, the forward yoke. Kasen would be crushed if she didn't snap out of her shock. Maul thought, for just a moment, about helping her.

A miner did. A Meerian woman dashed across the open space, seemingly unarmed, and shoved her arms under Kasen's. She dragged her out of the way while the ship's ramp closed and Maul headed for the bridge, quick, not a glance for the statue of the reptilian goddess.

The ship was, as he had predicted, easy to launch even without Kasen's presence. The security, like the display console and the rest of the ship, was outdated. Maul sat down and was able to start the engines almost immediately. There should have been a warm-up sequence, he knew - he was breaking all the rules of flying by taking off fast. But he could set down again just as fast, thousands of miles away, and do the preflight list then before plotting his final course for Glee Anselm.

The miners didn't seem to have any heavier defenses than the mech, because nothing struck the side of the ship as the engines turned on and revved up. Maul saw a few people move furtively between the prefab buildings, and could tell that a group had gathered behind the medical center, but now they were frightened. They were scouts, some of them were probably used to a board room, and the others had never expected to be using their pickaxes as weapons. They were cowed now. Riet had been the one with the most fight in her.

He wondered whether she would live.

The horizon tipped as he lifted off. The sky was still blue, the ocean calm, only the jungle giving any hint of the darkness that had once taken place at the training academy for child soldiers. Inside the jungle the shadows were deep and the colors fungal. It surprised Maul that more of them hadn't stretched exploratory tendrils and spores toward the prefab buildings already. Maybe they had.

As the ship hummed around him and he began to head toward cruising altitude, a great sense of peace came over him. Finally, he had freedom again.


	5. Chapter 5

Maul did indeed stop to do the preflight check in a more remote part of Orsis. This landscape was more like what he remembered, scraggly and rocky, one step up from a desert. Even here, though, mining machines could be seen on the horizon.

For most of the trip, Maul researched Glee Anselm. It wasn't difficult to find a database of hundreds of Motoko families, although since Maul had no idea what region Kilindi had come from or what her parents' names were, the list was only slightly more useful than a map of the entire planet.

The other thing that the research told him was that life on Glee Anselm was easier for an aquatic being than one that thrived only on land. Glee Anselm probably wouldn't look like it had a glut of water for a species like Mon Calamarians or Kaminoans, but it had enough that most of the dwellings were, he read, built half in and half out of either the saltwater sea or freshwater rivers and canals. There had to be enough dry land for emissaries of the Republic to walk on, though, and the holonet informed him that he shouldn't have trouble finding someone who spoke Basic.

There was a bit of a cultural divide on Glee Anselm, and one which, after getting sidetracked on Bandomeer, Maul did not want to accidentally disrupt. The Anselmi species had been basically forgotten by the Republic Senate after the Nautolan species had driven them to live, in ever-decreasing tribal numbers, in the remotest seas.

Then there was the problem of finding the Motoko family. It was important that he get to them, specifically. They had, for whatever reason, sent their daughter to a training camp for mercenaries. Some of the children Maul had fought beside had been orphans who had fallen into the underworld and found an affinity for it, while others were from underworld families, and had the full support of their parents and often their entire social network in their movement toward making hired assassin their career choice. Others had been runaways, who chose the life of an assassin because of the dark prestige. Just like any of the other groups, some of these succeeded and others did not. They must have been good at finding people in order to even know that the Orsis Academy existed.

Near the end of the trip, Maul blinked and pushed at the seat of Kasen's ship. He had kept the place clean, ignored the statue of the goddess, and realized that he would need to pick up fuel on Glee Anselm if not closer in order to get anywhere else.

_Focus_ , he thought.

Thinking too hard about Kilindi's family and what he would do when he got there made his brain fuzz, made his thoughts track toward her like trains on fixed rails. Wheels turning, arms pumping, stretching out across the world. He had not been greatly attached to her when he had killed her - now, it was almost like she was a ghost.

_Focus._

He was seeking solace, or something, from the people whose daughter he had murdered.

This would not be easy.

And he would likely get sidetracked from solace. The mean worming discontent that he had felt since Sidious abandoned him was tied up in all of these desires for focus. Maul needed to cast those things aside. He could use his single-mindedness as an ally as well as a curse.

He had never even had to think about that before.

For a while he distracted himself with the maintenance of the ship. Cleaning, minor repairs, and simply knowing what was what in this strange craft occupied him for most of the long journey. In between, he trained, shoving things to the side in the living room so that he could do katas and stretches. He powerfully wished for a lightsaber in his hand but had no idea where he would get one unless he came upon a Jedi he could easily pick off. There were surely one or two Jedi envoys or Watchmen on Glee Anselm.

He shook his head. He shouldn't want them to find him...or at least not as badly as he did.

The trip left him shaken and antsy. He had settled on going to the city with the highest number of Motokos. For whatever regional reason, and to Maul's great satisfaction, it was not a particularly large settlement. It stretched along one of the many coasts, a city on paper but really spread out into multiple districts or villages set on different patches of dry ground. The spaceport was open to visitors, only requiring a decontamination process against various alien diseases which, the travel guide said, should take only a few minutes.

Maul only learned the ship's name then, when he read it off of the identification screen when he had to descend to the spaceport. The name was _Jeklo Coli._ Maul had no idea what that meant.

When he arrived on Glee Anselm the moisture was so thick in the air that it ran down the walls. There were glistening puddles on the floor presenting reflections of the black metal ceiling overhead. Nautolan workers moved back and forth around the walls of the spaceport, carefully staying beyond the painted red and yellow lines to avoid the wash from the engine. Their long, green tentacles lay loose around their backs and over their shoulders.

Maul went through processing quickly. The techs were more worried about identifying bacteria than about identifying individuals. Decontamination was a swift process, although both signs and attendants told him that a change of clothes was recommended (body and clothes went through separate sprayers), and Maul did not have this option available. Providing for clothing was beginning to be a priority. Or, he could wash his in the sea.

As soon as he stepped outside the spaceport Maul was faced with a more rustic scene than the modern interior had led him to believe. Speeder taxis were queued up outside the spaceport, although this seemed to be a quiet period. There were only three businessmen, all Nautolan, waving down cars. The fashion on this planet seemed not unusual by Coruscant standards: the men clearly wore suits, although of a more flowing cut that crossed at the necks like Maul's own robes. One family of a species Maul didn't recognize - humanoid but with three large eyes - were packing suitcases into the trunk of another large speeder driven by one of their kind. The air smelled salty.

A sign had been written in flimsi, laminated, and nailed to a board just outside the spaceport. It showed directions to the nearest hotels and restaurants, of which there were few. This was not a tourist town. Maul looked to either side, wondering where to go. The road turned into dirt one hundred meters from the spaceport on either side.

He had memorized a few addresses of Motokos in the ship, and had an idea of the layout of the town, but had no commlink or personal computer to help him if he got very lost. The Force could probably guide him back to the spaceport, which had the largest concentration of people.

He headed toward a suburb called the Glen, which he had seen on the map. It was further inland than most of the rest of the city, set on an island in a swamp which was accessible by a high drawbridge.

Almost as soon as he got out of sight of the spaceport he saw that the town was quaint. The buildings were odd mixtures of stilted above-ground dwellings and pools, encircled by seaweed or rocks, which presumably housed even more underwater rooms. There was a town hall next to a general store next to a more modern-looking mall that displayed both fashionable clothing and diving suits in the windows.

His inability to swim in the water without the weight of his legs dragging him down would be a liability here.

He passed the mall and walked on to a landscape made almost entirely of bridges and sculpted ground. He was clearly getting further into the swamp, although the natives had done their best to separate squishy ground into sea-parts and land-parts. Small dams and locks dotted the flat land, with artfully decorated railings scattered throughout on the higher ground.

There were very few trees. One suburb seemed to have a cluster of them, and Maul thought that it was a safe bet to assume that that was the Glen. He could certainly be wrong - it could have been named hundreds of years ago, at a time when the area looked differently. But it was a start.

There seemed to be no laws at all about where or where not someone could jump into the water: Maul saw two Nautolans walking along the thin, dirt path ahead of him and one swimming with a child. He could only see the tops of their green heads as they moved quickly through the water. They could have been animals, migrating inland. The sun was hot, though, and Maul imagined that the cool water must be a welcome relief. It was about as warm here as it had been on Orsis, much hotter than Bandomeer, and humid but not muggy.

He crossed one bridge just out of curiosity, and saw a cluster of low houses beyond it. These weren't raised up on stilts. Instead, he saw gray buoys arranged around them. Were the houses floating? Perhaps they were tethered underneath. The ocean, more gray than blue here in the deeper water, made rippling waves around them.

Just beyond the bridge, a girl was fishing. She wore a loose red tunic and yellow pants, and her head-tails were decorated with wide bands in the same colors. She looked to be in her mid-teens, and was skinny to a degree that Maul almost thought might be unhealthy: her ankles and bare feet were tiny, with all of the bones outlined under her green skin. The cast of that skin looked healthy, though, and she reeled in the fishing line with practiced confidence. She had a metal cooler next to her, presumably holding the day's catch, and an overcoat lay rumpled on the neatly cut grass beside her.

The line she reeled in, though, held nothing. Maul couldn't see her expression as she examined the fibers, then tossed it back in again. In the Force, she did not feel particularly perturbed or disappointed.

She glanced up almost as soon as she saw him watching her, and although he could have loitered meters away pretending to look at something else, he approached instead. It was no use dawdling, figuring out what passed as polite on this planet.

The rod stayed in the water, bobbing slightly. Instead of taking her hands off it to look at him she simply switched them and turned slightly to look over her shoulder.

He couldn't threaten to push her into the water. It would have to be the Force or the blaster then.

As soon as she opened her mouth to speak he said, "I am looking for the Motoko family."

"I don't know anyone by that name," she said. She was soft-spoken. Regardless of how her species aged, that voice would make her sound young.

"I also need work, during my search."

She looked around. "Do you live here?"

"No. I just arrived."

She paused. "Are you a murderer?"

There was no correct way to answer that question. He tried to find one anyway. "I do not think so."

She smiled tightly, tentatively. He wondered if she knew where the nearest security station was. "What's your name?" She said.

"Maul."

This did not elicit a reaction any more than his appearance had. Perhaps she didn't know enough Basic. Whatever it was, Maul was finding that humans were just about the only species that found his appearance inherently frightening. Not every species told stories about devils with horns and red skin, and not all of them knew what "Maul" meant. There was a certain elitism in even naming oneself using a Basic word, since humans tended to think that since they were one of the fastest-breeding species in the galaxy they were right by virtue of majority, but that lent itself well to the Sith, who knew themselves to be right by virtue of minority.

"And you're traveling?"

"Yes. Looking for the family of my friend."

"Did you lose her?"

Which way? He wondered. There were many ways to lose people. He couldn't tell which one she meant, not by her inflection and not by her age. If she thought like a child, the question would be innocent. If she thought like a teenager, the question would be derisive. If she thought like an adult, the question would be pitying.

"Yes," he said, not sadly, to get the measure of her.

A few of her headtails flipped, the tips jumping up. He wasn't sure what that meant, but a moment later she seemed to have reached her decision on whether or not he was a murderer. "My grandmother is looking for help," she said. "Can you fish?"

Maul couldn't help but smile at the fact that she trusted him. How foolish she was, to believe this half-lie he had told. He had killed Motoko, and not looked back. The girl would be shocked, at the least, to know that. Instead, as he kept it from her it became a glowing spark inside his throat, a laughing secret that he lorded over her. To her, the emotion in his eyes would look like glee.

But now that she had started to trust him, he would have to deal with that as much as he would have had to deal with mistrust otherwise. Trust, someone knowing your name, was just another kind of burden sometimes. Kasen's persistence, while Maul was thankful for certain results of it, had proven that.

Could he fish. Maul hesitated. He was good at killing most things - should fish be an exception?

"Yes." He said. "Although I may have to be taught the traditions of your world."

She looked askance at him. "Fishing's fishing," she said with some surprise. Her tendrils all slid over her shoulder and disappeared behind her back, fast, like a brightly-colored anemone withdrawing into a hole in the ground. "Unless there's less gravity or something. Then maybe you have to look up."

"Take me to your grandmother."

"It's right over there." The girl pointed. "If you murder me, she'll see you. I just want you to know that."

Maul nodded. He needed to stay under cover for this mission. Although it was likely that the Motokos had no idea he was coming or even that he existed, he did not think that drawing a lot of attention to himself was the right way to go.

It had not ended very well last time.

She took her time reeling in her line, carefully stowing it away separate from the rod, in a wooden box. She affixed both to her person in order to carry them: the box went into a clip on her belt that Maul would have guessed had been specially sized for it, and the rod she slung over her shoulder.

The first time she turned her back on him she kept looking over her shoulder, her head-tails separating to allow her to look between them, looking more like a starfish's legs and less like human hair.

Then she walked briskly, though, leading him toward the village. Her grandmother's house was close. If she had screamed, the grandmother would most likely have heard it. Maul glanced at the bridge into the Grove proper, but the girl did not lead him that way.

The grandmother's home's connection to the water was not immediately apparent. The home looked like a very squat hut, much more enclosed than the other houses in the neighborhood. It looked less flood-resistant, less natural than the others. Maybe it was older, or newer, but it looked almost human.

The girl didn't knock in order to get in. She just pressed open the door.

Inside was a clutter of artwork. The mediums were varied: metal, paper, stone, but the style was consistent: natural, abstract forms, often climbing high or spiking upward, art impaled on metal rods. There were no faces, no recognizable forms or function. It was art for art's sake, and it would all likely be lost in the next flood.

The floor plan was open. Maul did see the home's connection to the water soon after he walked in; behind a table piled with sculptures there was simply a square hole in the ground, like a trap door without the hatch. The water beneath was deep and dark. Maul did not think that the girl's grandmother had tunneled straight down into the ground and found this: the whole town would be sinking if that were the case, and it looked as stable and dry as a town in an archipelago could be. The passage through the water must have been carved. Adding to that impression were the almost perfectly square walls that looked like they had been cut by a machine, or at least with intelligent intent. The passage went down maybe eight feet, deep enough for any natural size of Zabrak to completely submerge but not wide enough for them to turn around. If someone dived in head-first, they would need to go head-first. If they dived in feet-first they would need to go on feet-first, until they got to a bend in the passage. The water got darker there, but was colored in deep greens and blues and purple, perhaps reflections of the colors of algae covering the passage with a fuzzy carpet.

He looked up when the old woman shuffled something on her desk and looked up. Moving away from the pit, he saw that she was almost hidden behind a workbench piled with...something.

The old woman was surrounded by transparent sculptures - small globes, mostly, some hanging from wire frames and some strung like bracelets or necklaces. At her work bench she was creating a new one, holding one of the transparent, reflective balls (it looked exactly like a bubble) with one hand and a small black device with a pincer at the end in the other hand. There was a pile of the pincer things at her right hand. Her skin was a darker green than the girl's, with large dark pine splotches covering her forehead and extending onto her head tails. The skin there was not as deeply wrinkled as on her face, but showed the same crowfoot signs of age.

"This being is looking for work," said the girl, using the multi-species term 'being' since it was politer than 'man.' "He said he can fish. I know you were looking for someone to take advantage of the larger schools..."

Maul realized then that the girl might be hiring him to do her job. Time would tell him whether she wasn't very good at fishing or whether she had something else she would rather do. He certainly hadn't seen her catch anything so far.

Except for him.

"Where are you from?" The older Nautolan asked. Her voice was cracked but strong, and slightly accented.

"Bandomeer," he said without thinking much about it. He set that idea firmly in his mind. He would probably have to corroborate that lie with other people.

"And what is it you wear?" She looked at him intently, and Maul had to touch his own collar to remember that he was still wearing the necklace that Mother Talzin had given him in order to help him find Savage.

"It was given to me."

"On your home planet?"

He paused. "No."

She stood up, revealing a brownish-green tunic and pants under a thin, faded black shawl edged with equally faded green and gold tassels. "It's very pretty. What is it made of?"

He did not hold the talisman out, although she seemed to want to touch it. "I do not know."

She smiled. "Well, maybe we can find out. I have work," she said. "If you fish for me, I will pay you. Young Athon-Emen will teach you." Maul could tell that the girl had gotten her inflection from her grandmother, although the girl's accent was the widely used one that Maul had grown up hearing most often among the commoners who lived around the Galactic Senate. Maul himself tended toward an upper-class accent, but Sidious, in his role as Chancellor Palpatine, had decided on something between the two, something that would make most people he spoke to think that he might have come from their home planet, their home town.

The Nautolan girl and her grandmother spoke with the natural version of this faked kinship, in the same, slow way.

"Athonemen," Maul repeated.

" _Athon_ -E _men_." The girl pronounced her own name slowly, leaning forward. For the first time, she seemed comfortable with getting closer to him. Some barrier had broken. He had, presumably, shifted out of the _murderer_ category into the more convivial _stranger._

Her grandmother resumed her calm speech as if nothing had interrupted it, although perhaps a bit more assertively. "However, as you can see I have no room to house anyone in this cottage. I am sorry. There is a hostel near the airport if you want cheap accommodations. Even tell Ravel at the front desk that I sent you: it might be worth your time."

Maul nodded.

"When does he start?" Athon-Emen asked excitedly. Maul mentally put one check mark in the 'she has something to do besides fishing' category.

"Tomorrow morning. Come to this house when you're ready. I would like if it was before noon, but there is no rush at first."

"At first?"

"Yes."

He liked her seriousness, the way she laid down the rules without explicitly stating them.

Maul nodded. Now that the formalities were done, he focused on his mission again. "I am looking for a family named Motoko. Do you know of them?"

"Hmm." The grandmother thought about it. "Visal Motoko was on the town council until very recently. I think he lived in the Glen. He was a stormsurfer."

Maul tipped his head.

"He would go out in the hurricanes. Half of the council thought he would be killed. Or thought he was too old for it." She laughed quietly. Maul had a feeling that she respected what he did.

"Do you know anything else about him?"

"That's it. You could attend a council. Even if he's not there they might know."

"Thank you."

"I'll see you tomorrow." She looked at his talisman again, but did not ask any more about it.

When he went outside, Athon-Emen did not follow him, and he did not look back to see whether her grandmother, whose name he still did not know, had sat down. He had no intention of going to a hostel: he would sleep in the ship. That way he wouldn't have to pay for both birthing for the ship and a room for himself. He had Kasen's food stores too, enough to last him at least a week.

He walked back to the spaceport, smelling the sea and the sky. There were more people out now, although not much time had passed while he was in Athon-Emen's grandmother's house. The whiff of spring and the smell of wet dirt churned up under someone's feet were both relaxing and strange. The season was stirring, and Maul had jumped around to so many planets in the last year that his body didn't even know what to do with that fact any more.

Having a job and a cover story didn't help him find the Motokos, however.

Inside the ship he ate a ration bar and a previously frozen piece of fruit and headed back out to the Glen. He held on to the Dathomirian talisman for a moment, pulling it against his neck until it chafed. Savage had given this to him. Supposedly, it contained a blot of Maul's own blood, collected when he was training on Orsis. Maul had taken it from Savage when they had been traveling together. His brother had left it on a table, and, when Maul picked it up, not protested.

_"I don't need it any more," Savage said._

_This was before the Mandalorians but after Maul had kicked Savage into submission, a submission which ultimately revealed some sort of brotherly bond between them despite their very recent reunion and Maul's complete lack of memories of his family. The Dathomirian's (for Maul thought of Savage as Dathomirian but himself as a Zabrak) forgetfulness was not a sign of a grudge or a ploy: it simply happened. Savage was pushed along by life instead of making choices, but Maul respected things about that and knew in a way that it was no different from the way his own life under Sidious had gone. Savage had simply been born or re-born into less stable circumstances. If Maul could have given Savage to a Sith Master that Maul knew would not abandon Savage or use him as a pawn, Maul would have done that._

_Savage had dropped the talisman onto the table, hard. It had made a thumping sound. Maul picked it up more gently, since precision was his way and brutality was Savage's._

_Maul wondered whether there was still some sort of power in the thing. He didn't like the idea that it was magic - there was no such thing as magic. The talisman did not work off of any of the capabilities of the Force, though, not if Sidious had come at all close to teaching Maul the extent of the Force's abilities._

_Even if midi-chlorians in the blood could 'sense' midi-chlorians in the source of the blood, why would they glow this way? It was irrelevant to Maul whether the Force had some sort of larger consciousness or not. He used it so much, practically constantly, and thought that if it had wanted to tell him something in a way that a sentient being would, it would have done so already. A consciousness that did not communicate was no more useful than a non-sentient Force of nature - which could be very useful indeed. There was no use thinking about its will, though._

_At this point, Force philosophy got touchy, since 'the will of the Force' was a phrase often bandied about. The Sith had an easy solution to this, however. The Sith would do what they wished regardless, and the will of the Force, which was as indicated in the very word to create people with great power, was that one person gain the most power possible. Which person this_ was _did not matter so much as how much power they had._

_This was part of Sidious' philosophy regarding the rumored Chosen One. No matter what form the Chosen One took, the person who controlled him, her, or it would still be more powerful. This idea had lead Darth Bane to seek the Sith'Ari and it had lead Darth Sidious to seek the Chosen One. History would reveal which was more powerful, although it hardly mattered. Darth Bane was dead. In that regard, Sidious had won._

_Darth Maul sometimes enjoyed his status as tool of a greater power and sometimes resented it. These opinions varied depending on the day, the situation, and the amount of desperation he was feeling._

_"Leave it," he said to Savage as Maul looked at the talisman._

_"If you wish."_

_"I do," said Maul, and almost hissed._

_His brother backed away._

_Maul had kept the talisman out of a sense of protectiveness: not over his brother, and not even over his own blood, but over the Force. He would place what he ddi not understand next to his heart until he understood it. Whether that placement was a strangulation or an embrace did not matter._

Maul headed for the Grove. Athon-Emen was no longer in her fishing spot: Maul glanced at it as he passed. Her grandmother's door was closed. Beyond that the houses were bigger, with more elaborate porches. He could tell that even these were braced against hurricane winds. Some of them had pendulums on the bottom, as if the whole thing was designed to balance itself. A clockwork living space.

As soon as he crossed the gently curved wooden bridge into the area designated as the Grove, he saw that the houses were closer together here. It looked like an area that was not well travelled by spacers, but still provided enough amenities to its residents to be a sort of community all on its own: there was a shop in the center containing both a grocery store and a library. Slaughtered fish, silver and blue, had been arrayed in long rows in wooden boxes. There was an almost overwhelming smell of fish and salt. No one seemed to be walking around the thin paths between houses. The driveways looked too thin to contain speeders, although he didn't see any animal conveyance either. There were a few Nautolans in the shop.

Multiple homes had long surf boards sitting in the front yards, on the sides, or bobbing in the water behind them. (Every house in this puzzle-piece of a development backed into the swampy sea.) He chose the largest one as the one most likely to belong to the councilman Motoko. It looked grand enough to both keep up appearances and house children.

After choosing the home that he thought was most likely that belonging to his target, he went back to his stolen ship and pulled up HoloNet records for that address. Indeed, it was listed as belonging to his target.

He went out again that night.

There was no fence around the yard. Maul had gotten the impression that there weren't many fences in Nautolan towns, or at least not in this region: they would just tip over in the swampy ground, and Nautolans were not as touchy about their personal space as many humans were. Nevertheless, there was a private Coruscant courtyard feel to the grassy lawn outside the Motoko house. The carpet of grass was pine-green in the darkness. Glee Anselm's moons had not yet risen. Later in the day, there would be a soft green glow on the horizon from the reflected satellites and the algae thriving in the sea.

There was no fence to jump.

The Motokos had a ladder up to the on-land portion of their house. The underwater portion was accessed by a wooden porch, wider and more like a connecting corridor than the one on most of the other houses he had seen. That pathway would be open to the elements during storm except for the canvas sheets Maul could see folded at intervals along the open walkway. Maul imagined that they would be unfurled to create a sort of tunnel of canvas during mild rain storms, and shut again on sunny days or on storms so severe that they might blow the canvas away.

Maul arrived at the house from nearer the water and jumped up the ladder, clinging like a spider at the fourth rung before scurrying up further. He had picked the right night. There was a sense of tension in the room above. He heard people moving around, cutlery clacking with a dull sound like wood instead of a sharp sound like metal.

He heard snatches of conversation, in both a male and female voice.

"I don't think that will be necessary."

"We could donate to your cause. A cause of your choice, that is. There are various charities..."

"Hurricane Salav survival rates..."

And then a second male voice, this one deeper. It sounded older, like the man had worn out his throat with death sticks, or simply with age. "We will bring this up at the next meeting of the family. You planned to host it, correct?"

"Yes," said the woman hesitantly. But not here. There is a cantina in town that we thought might be good."

"Red Curtain."

One good thing about Nautolans was that you could hear their head gestures. The woman's head tails shushed and scratched against her clothing as she nodded or shook her head, bur a moment later Maul got his confirmation on which one it was. "That's the place."

Maul gripped the ladder, hanging close to it so that no one could see him from the road. He had done a similar thing when he had been listening in on InterGalactic Ore miners many years ago, the first time he had run into that ill-fated company. This time, he hoped, his stealth efforts would go more successfully. He had, after all, learned something from his mistake. And he needed not to show his face here if he was going to stay with Amon-Emen and her grandmother and become a recognized, benevolent part of the community.

He was going to have to buy a cloak with a cowl.

And then visit the Red Curtain.

But when?

The gravely-voiced man, who Maul assumed but was not positive was a Nautolan as well, wanted to know the same thing. "I know Rakosh does his work there. He is usually in late..."

"We were thinking at 20 hours," the younger man said. "Good time for a drink, not too late."

The older man nodded. He seemed displeased with the other man's increasingly casual tone, though, and adopted an angrier one. "Fine. Have a good evening, friends. I'll see you at Rakosh's." Slowly, and with what Maul imagined was a grumpy grandeur, he moved toward the door. Maul could hear the floor creak.

The Zabrak released the rung of the ladder. He fell fast, cushioning his drop with the Force only slightly in an almost instinctual reliance on it. He used the Force as easily as he used any of his senses.

He eased around the side of the house, his boots sinking into the damp grass.

The older Nautolan came out armed. He was dressed in a long, piratical coat, but Maul could immediately tell that he was holding something that was probably a weapon: a long stick. At first Maul could not even tell, in the dimness, whether it was the long barrel of a gun or a sword, but then from the way the man held it and presented himself to the night Maul realized that it was a cudgel or shock stick, maybe even something that could be disguised as a walking cane. The Force also told Maul that the Nautolan was not anticipating an attack. He was using the weapon both just in case there was anyone waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder and as a flamboyance. The Nautolan liked to appear ready, liked to swing the stick at people just to see them jump. Anything that was sinister about him could also be interpreted as jovial.

Maul watched him go, never revealing himself. The Nautolan looked around, but never past the corner of the house, and he was clearly unable to feel the Force. Maul did not think that he would pose much of a threat, now or in the future. He memorized the bulky shape of the old man's shoulders, though. Unable to see much of the man's head shape or face, Maul would rely mostly on the Force to recognize his presence, which was also weary, skeptical, sinister, and jovial.

Then, through a gap in a green curtain in the house above him, Maul got his first look at Kilindi Motoko's parents.

He barely remembered the shape of the young assassin's face, but thought he saw it reflected in the mother's long face and thin lips. She had big eyes - but then, all Nautolans did - and a small chin, making her face almost perfectly, bizarrely triangular. The father had a missing head tail, and did not make an effort to hide it. In fact it was one of the head tails that hung just in front of his left shoulder, and was one of the first things Maul noticed about the man, even from a distance.

They were talking, making subtle gestures with their hands and head tails, and were not angry about the conversation in which they had just participated. Their attitude was businesslike. They had clearly not taken anything personally. Maul watched them for a moment, but knew that his position was precarious, and departed.

On the way back, he thought about what he had learned. The two were part of something - something that the older Nautolan was also part of, which necessitated late-night meetings with friendly bartenders. There was also charity work involved, but the whole conversation had had an aura of clandestine nastiness about it that made Maul think that there was more politicking than good will going on here. The charity had been discussed like a business venture, which perhaps it was. He had a bad feeling about it, though.

Which could be very useful. If the older man was bribing the councilman Motoko in order to get something done for him, Maul would file that information away and see if he could use it.

(For what? He thought, back in his brain where he didn't want to think about it too hard. What mission was he on, right now? To find out about the family, yes, but - he was purposefully making it hard on himself, making it run like one of Sidious' missions. Almost exactly like one of them, in fact, if he considered both InterGalactic Ore, the skulking on ladders, and the political corruption.

What was he here for?

He had to tell the Motokos that he knew their daughter at one point. Athon-Emen would notice if he kept passing them by without addressing the thing that he had told Athon-Emen he had come to this planet to do.

But he wasn't ready to just walk up to their front door. That would be too easy.

As it happened, the next day, something different but almost as easy presented itself.

The Motoko patriarch interrupted Maul's first fishing lesson.


	6. Chapter 6

Athon-Emen had taken the Zabrak, with a reluctant teenage slouch that had not been present in her the first time they met, to the same place where she had been fishing on the previous day.

Maul would have thought that the chance encounter was very lucky if he had not both believed that there was no such thing as luck, only the Force, and also if he had not known that the town in which he found himself was a small community where a higher than usual number of citizens knew who the town council members were and not only recognized them on sight but expected to talk to them.

Both Motokos were walking toward the Glen from somewhere in town. Maul had not seen them pass him when he had walked this way hours earlier. After that it had all been hooks, lines, and reels, and the slimy guts of brightly colored fish with black Nautolan eyes.

The councilman was wearing a long blue coat, which looked unseasonably warm. The woman wore a tunic and businesslike pants. Athon-Emen turned to look at both of them as they passed. When the councilman smiled, she remembered that Maul was looking for him.

"Oh!" she said excitedly, breaking out of her prior lethargy. Her short head-tails bounced. "My friend is looking for you."

"Oh?" The councilman said. Maul looked up from where he had been skewering a fat, dead worm on a hook.

"I saw your grandma Katrak's latest sculpture at the Grove gallery," the woman said. "It's beautiful. I hear they have a buyer already."

"That's great," Athon-Emen said. "I didn't know. She'll be happy to hear that."

"Did you have a question for me?" The councilman asked.

"Yeah," Athon-Emen said. "He said so." She looked at Maul expectantly.

The Zabrak stood up and crossed the grassy riverbank to stand in front of the couple. He nodded, almost certain that a bow would be too formal for this circumstance. They were, after all, standing next to a river, and he had worm slime on his bare hands. "I knew your daughter."

The Nautolans didn't react strongly. They both bowed their heads slightly, one after another, but it was more acknowledgment than grief.

"When?" Her mother said, almost happily. She was looking for a story of her daughter that she had not yet been told, an anecdote that she had not before heard.

"When we were young."

Maul waited, let that suggestion become a playground or a neighbor's house in the mother's mind.

"So you know she was killed," the mother said.

Maul nodded. "I had heard."

"Do you need anything?"

He shook his head.

"Did you come here to see us?"

"Partially. I am glad that we met. But I am also traveling."

"You've gotten work, I see."

Maul nodded.

"Amon-Ethen and her grandmother are good people." She smiled. "My name is Laura." It was a human name, and Maul thought it was strange that she would have it, but he simply nodded. It wasn't important.

"Maul," he said. She kept smiling.

"I heard your husband is a councilman," Maul said.

"Yes." She looked at him.

"And yourself?"

"An accountant."

Maul looked at the husband. Rapid-firing questions now, burning to answer as many scattered queries as he could. Trying to find out why he was here. The words pressed up against his teeth, crackling as he let them out. "Is there much crime in this area?"

"Enough." Motoko said. He glanced at his wife. "The police handle it. To be frank, I don't have the constitution any more to talk a lot about it," the man said. "I do my job, though. I get by thinking that evil people can't sleep well at night."

What a strange concept of a pushy, insomniac justice, Maul thought.

The Motokos took their leave not long after. Maul watched them go, getting the feel of their Force signatures: both hiding something, both smarter than they looked - and they looked smart. They wouldn't have been out of place on Coruscant, and the city-smarts meant that they lived at a different pace than the residents of this small Glee Anselm city did.

Another Force signature interrupted them: Athon-Emen. She was radiating anger.

"They're wrong, you know," the girl said. Maul didn't turn around. The Nautolan couple were too far away for them to hear her when she was speaking at a normal level, and besides, she was speaking right at Maul's back, like she wanted the words to sink into the black fabric of his cloak.

"About what?" he said.

"About the crime. They won't say it, but the Liefsat are getting worse, not better. Grandmother says."

Maul looked at Athon-Eman. "What is the Liefsat?"

"Um." She hesitated. "It's like the Black Sun? Do you know what that is?"

"Organized crime." He made sure not to be emotive about his recognition of the name. If he looked too shocked, it would make her think about why. Better take his cue from a droid, and simply acknowledge the name as existing in his memory banks.

She nodded. "They used to be a problem around here. Some people say they still are, but they mostly work in the larger cities. And they're not as grandiose as they used to be. Some of them use their money and get big houses and all, but a lot of them just sit in cellars with water up to their knees and hide, because they don't want people to find them and take away their millions of credits. That's what they say."

"Is that what happened to your parents?"

Her head-tails twitched, five of them in concert, and she glared, the skin between her eyes wrinkling. "You know, you might want to not just ask people things like that. I could be sensitive."

"Are you?" Maul said.

"No."

"Who do you know who's sensitive?"

"You ask a lot of questions," Athon-Emen said.

"Is someone?"

"My classmate lost her mom a few weeks ago, okay? We're all on eggshells about it. And she wants us to be. You should be on more eggshells."

"What happened to your parents?"

"Nothing. They're still alive. Just when I was four they had so much spice in the house that the government took me away. My mother still lives in a house full of spice. My father comes around every once in a while. He's trying to find his feet. He's been trying to find his feet for fourteen years."

Mauk picked up the fishing rod.

They kept fishing.

"This is the easy stuff," Athon-Emen told him halfway through the afternoon, when her grandmother brought them sandwiches filled with some leafy plant thicker than lettuce. "I'll teach you where you to find the bigger ones when you're ready."

"When will I be ready?" Maul said, glancing aside at the basket of fish they had already caught today: nine fat ones, and they had tossed back three or four fingerlings. He meant it as a joking sentence, but realized that it had probably come out flat. He was not practiced at expressing humor to other people.

Athon-Emen was better at jokes. She adopted an administrative scowl. She looked between him and the fish with exaggerated judgement. "Almost."

Maul went back to his ship after an afternoon of fishing. Athon-Emen had kept up her authoritative ruse to the extent that he did not know exactly how well he had done compared to her usual catch, but the bucket of fish could, he thought, feed both the girl and her grandmother for at least a few days. In exchange, her grandmother gave him forty credits. It wouldn't always be this much, she said. It depended on how well the sculptures of water had sold. But sometimes it would be more.

He slept curled up, his back pressed against the walls of Kasen's bedroom, one cheek flat against the pillow. By now, the ship smelled like him instead of Kasen and the statue of the goddess was fuzzy with dust. Maul slept soundly.

His alarm went off at seven.

He dressed quickly, looked at the money that he had placed in a drawer, and realized that he would need to buy new clothes tomorrow. He should have enough credits for at least a pair of pants.

For now, though, he needed to go to the Red Curtain.

He debated on whether to keep his blaster. He had no holster, and it would not fit in his boot. His belt had worked well so far, but he had no idea what sort of fight he might get into at the cantina, and if there was a weapons-check policy he could end up making more noise than he wanted to before he had begun. A weapons-check policy would also make it very easy for him to see where almost all of the other weapons in the establishment were, though, and in the end he decided on holstering the blaster, not steathily, in his boot.

The cantina was on the outskirts of the part of town that had grown up outside the spaceport. It looked too dingy to be popular with tourists, but the bouncer wasn't a Nautolan. He was another aquatic species, and Maul thought that he might have been one of the downtrodden Anselmi. While Nautolans had councils, Anselmi were relegated to reservations. Maul had been under the impression that they were all under water, but this person with red skin and wide pink gills on his neck was a good candidate for Anselmihood.

He barely looked at Maul as the Zabrak opened the cantina's narrow door and went inside.

The floor was damp. A full half of the room was under water. What looked like a large pool to Maul's right was in fact a dance floor. Splashes came up from the surface, and Maul could see Nautolans moving in the shadows. Lights set into the metal walls changed color every few seconds, green to blue to red to orange.

The above-water section of the cantina had a bar and several tables, many of which were empty. An identical bar stretched across the right-hand wall, but because it was under water Maul could only identify it by the strip of yellow lights along the counter, and the faint outline of shining reflections on bottles. He hoped that the meeting he was here to overhear took place in air that he could breathe.

A Nautolan emerged from the underwater portion and walked across the room right in front of him, dripping. Maul growled and was ignored. The movement made him realize that he needed to stop standing in the doorway, though, or someone would start to notice. There was a back stairway that appeared to be set into the natural curvature of the land. The cantina had, Maul noticed from the outside, a small hill behind it. That was unusual for this flat seaside community, and Maul wondered whether it was man-made. He crossed the room toward the stairway, which was made of a sort of turf or peat moss that gave slightly under his boots but kept its shape enough for walking not to be difficult. He presumed that since no one had asked about his weapon yet, that either blasters were allowed or no one had noticed. Frankly, it was not a place that looked like it allowed blasters. The atmosphere was relaxed, perhaps edgier under the water than above it, and the clientele looked to be, in general, younger than the Motoko couple and far younger than their co-conspirator.

The upward slant of the building gave him an idea, though, and Maul quickly turned and walked out of the cantina again. Once outside, he examined the lay of the land outside. On the right hand side the sea encroached on the building, and it looked deep. There were three motorized surf boards moored to one ring at the back. The underwater bar was on that side, and probably drew water from that very sea. Maul thought about wading into it and simply swimming around to the upper room, then grimaced, remembering the last time that he had assumed he could swim. He would have to find another way.

On the left hand side of the building, the land sloped upward in a hill of dark, wet grass. Maul walked up there. Some windows on that side of the bar were open, and Maul could hear the two people at the occupied table in the dry-land portion talking. Once beyond it he saw the hump of the upper room. It was partially sunk into the ground, with the water at mid-level on the right side. The sea was deep here where it butted up against the small hill behind the bar. Designing the place must have been a nightmare, unless they channelled the water around it after it was built. Luckily, there was one small window on the landward side. More of a vent than an actual aperture for viewing, it was a tiny rectangle of grass set into the grassy wall. The hill had grown right over the bar, and the tiny window inside it glowed.

Maul moved to the back of the bar and laid down in the grass. The moisture in it immediately soaked the front of his tunic in unpleasant cold, which he tried to ignore. He could sense people inside the upper room, but could not see them. The window had a latch right inside it, a mechanical swinging bar that was easy to manipulate with the Force. Maul pushed it. The window would only crack open, and it was not nearly large enough to drop through and interrogate the Motoko conspirators inside the room, but it permitted sound to exit the room.

His timing was good. The Motokos were inside, and must have started their meeting slightly early. Maul's mistaken entrance into the bar had given them time to finish their small talk. Now, they had gotten right to the point - and the point was exactly what he wanted to hear.

The point was about him.

"There's a newcomer in town," he heard the councilman say. "A Zabrak. I think he knows that Kilindi went to the Orsis Academy."

"So what? It was a training school," said the older man. Maul leaned in as he kept speaking. "No one knows it was for killers unless they _are_ one. Maybe he thinks that she was there to learn kriffing decorum."

"I don't think so. He didn't explicitly say that he attended, but it was...something like that," Motoko said.

"Hmm." The older man muttered.

Motoko said, "Are you just going to make noises? No one in town was supposed to know anything about that except me or you or my wife."

Laura Motoko hadn't spoken yet, and Maul wondered whether she was even in there. He could not sense her, but she and Motoko shared very similar Force presences. He blinked and concentrated. It was very likely that she wasn't in there. Which meant she was somewhere else, but knew that this meeting was happening and what it was about. He would have to keep an eye out for an ambush.

"Then we get rid of him," the older Nautolan said.

"That would require bringing in a different assassin."

Maul heard the older Nautolan's head-tails shift. "Humf."

"I don't like that tone, Janus," Motoko said.

"You don't have to like it. Neither do I."

"No assassins. Not yet. I don't know how much he knows, or even how much it matters."

"That's true. It would only have mattered if she was still alive. I imagine that's cold comfort." Janus's gravelly voice actually sounded pitying.

"It's been a long time," Motoko said. "That doesn't make it better. But it makes whether it mattered or not...matter less."

"Okay. We'll move beyond it for now."

For about fifteen minutes they talked about other things, enough that Maul was sure they were in, or were the entire membership of, the Liefsat that Athon-Emen had mentioned. Motoko would give money to one councilwoman's charity in order to gain her trust and to encourage the members of that charity to vote for Motoko when the next election came around. Maul was bored. The cold grass kept him too uncomfortable for falling asleep to be a concern, so he simply lay there, eyelids drooping, letting the words flow in and out of his consciousness while he waited for any that were relevant to him. His own name or Kilindi's, or even a mention of the Republic or InterGalactic Ore, would bring him out of the trance. But for now, it was almost comforting to lay here and wait.

Then the clinking of glasses changed, and Maul blinked out of his cold stupor. He was almost shivering.

"I'll let you know when would be best to meet next," Janus was saying.

There was a rustling sound like the two men were putting on coats. "I'll see you at the ball game next week right?"

"Ah yes." Janus sounded warm again. "My boy is coaching a good team."

They started to walk down the stairs. Maul could hear their feet hitting the packed dirt. He pushed himself off the grass, feeling his tunic sag unpleasantly heavy with dew, and ran to the bottom of the hillside.

He entered the bar just as the two men were coming down the stairs. He recognized Motoko- he was even wearing the same coat from before - and immediately pegged the second one as the older man the couple had been speaking to in the house. Nautolans didn't go gray, but they got more wrinkled and more spotted, and the man was both. He also had an elaborate series of rings on one of his head-tails, making him look vain and even more piratical than his coat had the previous evening. He was still carrying his weapon, and Maul was almost certain now that it was a shock-stick. A tamer cousin of the lightsaber, the shock-stick could be electrified along its entire length besides the handle. It was also only illegal in certain areas, since, the argument went, it was technically only as dangerous as a broken commlink with an exposed wire.

The towns that had lax rules about shock sticks often also had councilmen like Motoko.

As soon as Maul walked through the door, with his head bare and his chest stained darker black by the dew, the two Nautolans recognized him. They didn't bother to disguise their shock. Head tails whipped the air, and Janus raised his shock stick. He made the movement look more like an avuncular old man wagging a cane harmlessly at a disobedient child than like a warrior taking a fighting stance.

That triggered the urge to fight in Maul again. There was nothing else for it now. They knew he had gone to the academy. They knew he knew what Kilindi had been. Maul felt no dislike for the Liefsat or pity for the town's citizens, but he also, ever since Sidious had taught him about the Black Sun, viewed organized crime as something to disdain. People who couldn't use the Force banding together to attempt evil on a grand scale was like ants trying to wage war against the owner of the ant farm.

Maul charged toward the two Nautolans.

With a gleam in his eyes, Janus shifted the stick to a more aggressive stance, holding it in front of him like a sword. Maul couldn't see any electricity manifesting in sparks or light on the gray baton, but he heard a slight hum in the air and saw that Janus' finger was on the trigger. The weapon was active.

Even as he ran, Maul clenched his fist and rotated his hand like he was turning a gear. He slashed the shock stick toward Janus, lashing the man across the face with it. Janus screamed, but Maul didn't have time to see what damage he had done. He tossed Janus and the stick both into the underwater portion of the cantina.

The stick immediately electrified the water, creating sparks and waves and sending a scream into the Force as the Nautolans inside were scorched.

Motoko drew a tiny holdout blaster. Maul kicked it out of his hand, so that Motoko drew his wrist away and clutched it. Maul stepped on the blaster and crushed it, scattering tiny pieces across the floor.

He picked Motoko up by his throat.

The Nautolan struggled, kicking. His first few kicks found Maul's nerveless, mechanical legs, but then his knee hit Maul's gut and hurt. Maul heaved Motoko toward the bar, but the man was making it difficult, bending over Maul's arm, pushing down as much as he could toward the floor. He was tall, too, taller than Maul, and his strategy was working.

As soon as Motoko's feet touched the floor he had the weight advantage. Maul's arm was burning with the strain.

So he let go. In the moment of weightlessness he picked Motoko up with the Force and slammed him against the bar. The Nautolan, caught between the bar and a stool, tried to scramble on top of the counter. Maul let him, followed him, landed on the bar with both his feet slapping the plastic surface at the same time. Motoko scrambled backwards and Maul grabbed for his neck again. Motoko slapped him away, looking surprised that he had done it, and whipped a punch around. It hit Maul's chest, but he didn't let it bother him. He had been hit harder. He grabbed Motoko's wrist, pinned it between his own forearms, and twisted: the wrist didn't quite snap, but Maul heard a crack and saw Motoko go limp for just a moment.

Maul Force-choked him, whipped his head around like a bantha straining at a chain. Controlling a Force-choke from a distance was hard.

All those fiddly _pipes_ in the throat...

Motoko writhed.

The bartender, a tattooed Nautolan woman who Maul thought might or might not be the bar owner Rakosh, ducked as the people at the tables ran for the door. Behind Maul, he could hear splashes and imagine the white froth on the dark green water as the people in the underground portion struggled to get out of the electrified pool, lapsed in and out of consciousness, and realized something was going on above.

Motoko was starting to try to breathe through his gills now. Dry pink gashes opened up where his neck met his shoulder.

Maul pushed him up against the shelf behind the bar, the plastic compartments with neat ranks of full bottles.

"You said you didn't have the _constitution._ "

"I don't." The Motoko patriarch struggled. Behind him, Maul heard a wet slap of bodies on the floor as the Nautolans closest to the surface heaved themselves out of the water, like beached whales, like performing animals. Bottles snapped behind Motoko. "I just do things for them sometimes," Motoko babbled. "To make the council run more smoothly. Our - there are others, more involved than me."

"Your wife."

"No!"

Maul pressed the man further into the broken shelf, the mess of jagged glass. "No!" Motoko's face wrinkled up, his eyes not squeezing shut like Maul imagined a Zabrak's would under such pain, but widening until they seemed to take up half of his face. He was lying: Maul could sense it. He had also prepared himself for holding out against torture in order to protect his wife.

The situation was not unlike that which had lead to Maul's capture of Satine. Maybe he could do the same here.

"Come with me," Maul said, and pulled Motoko off of the wall. The Nautolan gasped; some of the glass shards had lodged in his back, and blood fell in lazy clumps against the wall of the bar as Maul pulled him away.

Then he sensed Laura behind him. He had been too focused on Motoko to see - but she wasn't even inside the bar yet. In a few steps she would be, and bringing danger with her.

Maul flung Motoko over the bar, entangling him in the stool again for a moment before he painfully wriggled free and eased onto the floor. These Nautolans were flexible: Maul could have sworn that Motoko hadn't curved his spine that way before.

Laura came in holding a blaster as long as one of her head-tails. The thick body of the gun glowed blue and fired, shooting a circular bolt - a stun bolt - right past Maul's head and nearly hitting Motoko.

"Don't move," she shouted, eyes blazing and head-tails whipping behind her. The ones hanging over her shoulders she kept still. Maul could see from all the tension in her frame and in her hands that she was making an effort, probably to keep them out of her line of sight. Her anger was thin and vicious, but he could sense that she was willing to talk as well. She braced in the doorway, both hands hefting the blaster.

"No more involved than I am," Motoko said. He leaned himself against the bloodied bar stool, pulled unsteadily to his feet, and, stumbling, backed away.

She shot the stun bolt again, aiming to miss. She spared a glance for the people still climbing out of the pool. Some were now going in for fallen friends, the bar lights still changing from one neon color to the next.. "I had a feeling you would be here. We've been waiting, you know. Waiting for someone to remember. The Orsis Academy can't have erased all the records."

Maul latched on to that. "Why...would they..."

"I haven't a kriffing clue. But I know how organizations work. It was someone's advantage to kill kids - one hundred kids who were working there."

_She doesn't know,_ Maul thought. _She thinks it was an inside job. I can use this._

He began to consider when it would be best to tell the Motokos that he had killed their daughter. That there had been no hard feelings about it, not really. Even less for her than for others. He had enjoyed killing the occasional one, the bullies who weren't even skilled at bullying or the ones who put up a good fight.

It was Sidious' instinct, imparted to Maul, to wait for the right moment to tell the Motokos that Maul had killed her, that her death was part of a force beyond anything they could understand. That it wasn't about money, or power. That it was about keeping Maul safe.

Protecting someone else's child.

She pointed the blaster at him. "Evil people can sleep well at night. People who mourn can't."

Maul didn't think that it mattered. He shrugged, waited a moment for her to make a move. Instead, she spoke.

"So who do you work for? Black Sun?"

He snarled.

"Freelancer?"

He gave her no response.

She fired. He drew his blaster and shot back, filling the room with confusing lines of light. He ducked behind a bar stool next to the moaning Motoko for a moment, noted that the stool was screwed in to the floor, and jumped over it at her. He landed solidly, but as soon as both feet hit the floor one blaster bolt hit him, sending a prickling feeling all along his right arm and shoulder, threatening to freeze him entirely. He lifted his left hand. She lifted her right as if to block a punch, shoving the blaster against her hip to precariously hold it pointing upward, and he wrenched the big blaster out of her left hand with the Force.

He kicked her knee, then hooked his foot around the back of her leg and toppled her. She grabbed for the blaster, wriggled across the floor in that odd Nautolan movement, and gripped the gun again. "Jedi?" She said. She was more hurt than surprised. Despite her connection to the underworld, she had a firm belief in Jedi as good guys.

He kicked her in the stomach, and she doubled over and screamed. She fired as she did so, in more a reflex than an attack, and he called upon the Force to lean just to the side of the wild blaster shots. He saw the blue lines streak past him out of the corner of his eyes.

She curled around herself, still gripping the blaster but clearly weakened by the kick from a metal foot. "Do _you_ sleep well at night?"

Again, it wasn't worth the breath to answer her. No matter how many times he risked himself this way, though, he couldn't help but stop to hear her last words before he killed her. He was still holding his blaster. It wouldn't be difficult just to shoot her in the head. He was stepping over other bodies now as he circled her: people still stunned by the electric blast in the water.

"What you do is cruel." She laughed derisively. He could imagine all the things she was accusing him of: naiveté, ignorance, not enough want of money. She did not know what he was, so she could pretend all she wanted that she was safe, that she knew anything about him.

(Obi-Wan had been the one who had known the most, after Sidious. Even Savage had not known the most important chapter of Maul's life. Everything after Sidious, no matter how long it dragged on, had just been a coda to that mission on Tatooine and Naboo. The fact that Sidious might know more about Dathomir and the Nightbrothers than Maul did appalled him. Obi-Wan had nearly sent everything crashing down when he said "I know what you are" to Maul in the Mandalorian throne room.

Of course, Maul would never let the Jedi know how close he had come to unravelling Maul's history.

It shouldn't have been such a sore spot, Maul had thought many times afterward. He was not an animal any more - and had never really been. The witches had revived him and in the process had taken away his sanity, and the witches had given it back. Maul was done with them now.

And after all that, taking care of Laura Motoko would be easy.

He could afford to savor this.)

"Do you know why we started this?" Laura Motoko said. She sounded tired, hurt, hesitant. Her words tripped over one another and merged together like small, white-capped waves. "My grandfather was poor. Very poor. He was a fisherman. Later we learned that all the money he...he had earned had come from the Liefsat. He would run spice from one island to another when the catch was down. But one day the police caught him. The Liefsat, they didn't have any use for him any more once he said that he wouldn't risk ..." She released a sigh, almost a cough. "Getting caught again. He was a good man. He knew that a lot of people can't leave at that stage. They get caught again and again, thrown into jail for a while, and go back to drug running. But they also usually end up destitute in the end. My grandfather saw that in his future and didn't want it. Instead, he became a penniless penitent. His choice didn't make the fish flock to his waters. He was a poor, good man, just like he wanted to be. A hungry good man.

"So when I needed it, I went to the Liefsat. My husband and I could provide more secure services for them: accounting, business here and there. Paying off the kind of lawyers that put my grandfather in jail the first time."

Maul glanced to the side. The Force had shown him something more interesting.

Janus had dragged himself out of the water, into the pile of unconscious and moaning people. His hands were scorched black, and Maul's initial strike with the shock stick had raised green and pink welts across his face. His right eye was bloodshot. On the left, the shock stick had grazed his cheek.

Laura glanced at him, then - she was going to draw a thermal detonator out of her pocket. They were going to throw it and leave out the back to escape. Maul saw it as clearly as if it had already happened.

Laura also knew that he was something like a Jedi, though. It rankled him that her mind had jumped to the Jedi immediately, although of course it had - the Sith were hidden, and they had always intended to be hidden.

Janus dashed across the room to grab Motoko. It was a move that would have been self-sacrificing if this was actual war, if Janus had any hope. Laura took the opportunity to throw herself across the room, stumbling once, then dove neatly into the entrance to the underwater cantina, from which the electricity had faded, hardly making a splash.

The thermal detonator she had dropped on the way rolled across the floor. Maul pushed backwards toward the door, but the shockwave from the thermal detonator still caught him and pushed him to the ground outside the bar. Luckily, the door had been open. The wet front of his tunic was also unexpected luck: tiny flames danced on his left sleeve, and he slapped them away, but most of his tunic was unharmed because it had already been damp from the grass and the splashes inside.

Two of the walls of the cantina sagged. If the woman who may or may not have been Rakosh hadn't escaped, she was seeing her business and/or place of employment fall down around her gills now.

He could sense that the three Nautolans had dashed back into the upper room. Maul followed.

The pool and poolside were empty. Presumably everyone there had escaped into the water. Maul realized that he wouldn't be able to come back to this town now: too many people had seen his face. Too many would connect him to the councilman. It was likely that Janus was a well-known public figure too.

He almost felt bad for Athon-Emen.

The blast had shattered the bottles that he hadn't broken under Motoko.

The thermal detonator hadn't touched the upper room. The room was lavish, with a long table covered with an expensive-looking red cloth and covered with plates of food, cups, and bottles. A small door to the right lead out to the black ocean.

The Nautolans were still there. Janus and Laura were each on their own motorized surf board, leaning into the swell fifteen feet out into the gently rocking sea. Motoko was closer, struggling around his limp wrist with the leg straps of the third board. The salt smell of the sea seemed to reach up and smack Maul.

Why was he doing this?

To find out where Motoko had come from, yes. And now he knew - she was going to be trained to work for the Liefsat. She would propel her family even further into their life of crime.

He couldn't have just asked. He had to shock the family into admitting that they knew.

Now, Maul was just fighting because his victims were fighting back.

He was all right with that. He had already electrified a bar full of people and seen a hole blown in the wall of a popular cantina. There was no going back to Athon-Emen without an explanation now.

He wasn't sure whether he planned on killing the Liefsat members when he caught them.

But once Maul got on a scent, he didn't let go. And they had tried to kill him, now. That got his blood boiling. That made it even.

Motoko's engine roared, and the three took off.

Maul leapt. He landed on Motoko's surf board right next to the man, immediately weighing it down. The motorized surfboards were more like small boats, though, and somehow, Motoko kept it afloat, wrestling with foot pedals and a tense rope, wildly shifting his balance in movements that looked erratic but somehow turned into smooth adjustments that enabled them to stay upright.

Maul teetered, grabbed onto the steering rope. Motoko elbowed him in the face. Maul's stomach churned as the ocean plunged out from underneath them as they reached the top of a swell and slid down into the open ocean, or what passed for it -

The water here was as broken up as the land around town. Flat-topped islands of brown and black rock were the most common obstacles, although there were some dangerously pointed-looking spikes of rock as well. All in all the impression was of a sunken city, although the landscape of waves rolling over rocks was surely a result of erosion and flooding rather than disaster.

Motoko struggled, hitting Maul with his elbows, terrified but both erratic and unfailingly solid on the board. The Nautolan succeeded in hitting Maul in the face, hard: he felt his teeth clamp together, and for a moment felt himself reeling backwards.

Maul thought that he would fall into the water. He imagined the miles of clear blue water closing over him, looking as frail as cloth even though, piled one molecule over another, it was as dangerous as if he had been cast into deep space. Janus and Laura's surfboards kept going, almost out of sight now, cutting wide white trails in the water.

Maul still had his blaster in hand. He had hardly thought about it after the thermal detonator went off. He fired twice, hitting Motoko in the stomach.

The man screamed, let go of the steering rope.

Motoko grabbed Maul's talisman.

It had come free from under his tunic some time during the fight, and now the Nautolan had both hands on the blue circle. The cord bit into the back of Maul's neck, causing him for lurch forward in pain even as he was glad that it wasn't the more sensitive front of his neck that was being garroted. He used his own momentum to lessen the strain, moving toward Motoko, the surf board rocking back and forth as a wave rose up underneath them. It was a big one, larger than any other Maul had seen this far out. Bubbles and bits of ocean life churned inside it in crazy spirals.

The talisman snapped. Motoko fell backward onto a wave-washed cliff just as the wave was sucking outward, suddenly picking the surfboard up underneath Maul and leaving an open trough of air where Motoko had been a moment ago. Maul crouched, slipping on his hand and knees on the wet, rough-skinned board. The talisman fell right in front of him, struck the board, and began to slip. The Nautolan's body struck the previously submerged mass of rock spread-eagled, with a jolt that Maul imagined broke most of Motoko's bones. He felt the man's Force presence, frightened and conniving but also full of sadness and love for his family, wink out.

Maul teetered. A moment later the board started to slide down the wall of wave toward the open ocean, in a smoother ride but one likely to end in the same fate as the Nautolan's. The wave might curl over under its own weight, or the rock floor become so shallow that the surf board couldn't ride over it any more without scraping the bottom, and send Maul into an uncontrolled spin with an unknown number of other huge waves surely on the way right behind him.

He grabbed for the talisman, suddenly worried that the last proof he had of his brother's existence would be snatched away by the waves. Slick and sliding, he nevertheless grabbed the small disk.

By the time he straightened up, the other two Nautolans were gone, even their ocean trails fading into the blue.

What would Athon-Emen do now?

What would Maul do?

And Savage. His brother's death had been lurking in the background all along. So much of this was about Savage, and Maul wanted to throw that misguided affection away.

He keyed the motor and slowly moved back to the spaceport.

It was not a good idea to try to go to Athon-Emen right now. It wouldn't be any great difficulty for the old man Janus and crafty Laura to paint themselves as the victims. He would have to take off again.

It would be easy. The ship was right there.


	7. Chapter 7

Maul did not want to leave Glee Anselm entirely yet. He could still find more about Motoko, although now he knew everything he needed to know about her family. He flew through the night, looking for the bright light of cities, listening to the chatter. He had left the surfboard at the side of the ocean and walked back into the spaceport with his blaster in his boot, just another spacer coming from a night out on the town.

He found a large city. He found another spaceport where people could live, like in a hotel. He knew where he could find work now: fishing. The ocean was everywhere. And luckily, the next day, he found an occupation that would suit him despite his legs. He met Nautolans, rough wide-shouldered people who did not care who he was, who smoked death sticks and placed bets in warehouses filled with fish and the smell of fish.

He kept his talisman. He spent the credits that Athon-Emen's grandmother had given him, and he made more. Years passed.

For a while, he felt like he had found what he was looking for. For a long while, he did not think about Sidious and the Jedi.

He heard of them on the HoloNet sometimes, and each transmission was another surge of anger. He could get in fights here in the city without anyone remembering who he was the next morning. There was more species diversity here, and if there were corrupt councilmen, they did not stoop to meet him.

He heard about the Jedi.

And then, for a while, he didn't hear about them any more.

The night the Republic fell, Darth Maul woke up in clammy, sweaty sheets. He had dreamed of himself walking through the halls of the Jedi Temple, bodies fallen on the rich carpets and against the columns. He dreamed of smoke and fire, the smell of blaster shots, shouting in the streets and electric pulses of panic and horror in the Force.

He dreamed of this often. Usually it was pleasurable, almost relaxing. He could sink into the mission, the hard, dull work of slaughter, and know who he was.

Tonight, there was something else in the Temple with him.

When he rounded a high-ceilinged corner into a deep hall he saw it, a black pillar of a man with no face, just a dark oval and wisps of fog like waving hair.

It had killed the Jedi, and that was the first thing that rankled him - it had killed them first, not even leaving him scraps. It had no gender. It had even fewer characteristics than a droid, but somehow it moved forward, and looked at him without having eyes.

It never came for him. It never moved closer, after that. Around him, he knew, the slaughter was continuing: the thing in front of him didn't have to move or even be present to stretch out its arms and crush a classroom, a dormitory - Its presence started all this, and not even its physical appearance could affect it at all. What had been loosed would not return to its handler. This end was inevitable even before this thing came into being, in whatever way it arrived in the galaxy, out of the dirt or down from the sky, and because of that it was everywhere, and because of that, Maul's impact on his mission was null. If he had never been born, the Jedi would have fallen. If he had never met Sidious, the Jedi would have fallen.

In this dream, Darth Maul met the crux of the history of the galaxy, and hated it because it was not him.

There was something anathema about that.

He woke up with his sheets tangled around him, almost choking him.

He did not have the HoloNet in the ship, except for what was absolutely necessary for communication with spaceports, so he would not have found out until he went into work and found the fisherman staring, even the market almost deserted, and heard the fishermen tell one another that the capital of the Republic had been attacked, maybe by the Jedi, and anyway the Jedi Order was disbanded, and Chancellor Palpatine had reined everything in and declared himself Emperor, not for an emergency, but for what, although it was far too soon and far away to say, was being called a new era.

Of course, that was on Coruscant. It hardly mattered to the fishing economy of one city on Glee Anselm, except that a lot of people, fishers and customers, had gone home to be with their families. The galaxy had shivered. It was still waiting to find whether the quiet moment afterward was a death rattle or the start of a recovery.

Maul thought of his dream. It all felt like a dream, now, and that made the urge to go back to Coruscant easier to resist. Something else pushed in the opposite direction, an opposing force that would not let him even start planning to nose back in to Sidious' sphere of influence. A resistance he could not see or comprehend. Something magnetic.

_Stay._

_Rest._

As easy as falling asleep.

He knew that his reticence to return to Coruscant wasn't a natural state, though. Something was stopping him, and he couldn't identify what it was, but he couldn't fight it, either. It would be like fighting his reflection in the water.

(Maybe it would at least feel good, he thought sometimes.)

The idea of returning, of crunching Jedi Temple glass under his boot, stayed with him. The figure of the black shape, that person like a pillar, stayed too, though, driving him away. Unlike a nightmare, it did not dissipate or lose its power.

And so, Darth Maul continued on.

* * *

The water closed over Maul's head. Now, it didn't even phase him. In the sunny afternoon, the ocean depths were green and blue. Around him, other divers sank, harpoons slung over their shoulders. The metal clanked around him.

Each diver, encased in a heavy suit of green metal, landed on the sea floor with a soft puff of sand. Each diver moved away in his or her own direction, seeking the prey that may or may not come, the predators that may or may not find them.

This was Athon-Emen's tiny fishing operation commodified, made into a business that employed tens of itinerants and family members, all of them returning to the same warehouse at the end of the night. Mostly, they caught the large silver-blue fish that swam in sedate schools far out in the depths of the sea, just before the continental shelf.

Sometimes, though, there were bigger things.

A shadow cruised to Maul's right, and he sensed the slow, prehistoric malevolence of the shark. It reflected water color, but after it scissored closer he saw that its skin was in fact brown. All five fins were pointed and ragged. Its yellow eyes and yellow teeth gaped blindly, stupidly. It was only investigating him now, curious to see what had fallen into its waters in such great numbers but left no scent. The Nautolan fishing company hadn't plied these waters in a while. The rotated areas like farmers allowing fields to rest.

The shark cruised slowly, getting the lay of the land. It did not seem to expect fishermen to attack it, since it was probably one of the largest, but also least sustainable, creatures in the sea. It was probably far from its usual haunting grounds in deeper waters.

Maul pressed a button on his spear. The engine whined, clicking as gears turned inside the heavily sealed housing.

He let it loose before the shark knew it was coming. The automated spear pieced the animal just behind where Maul imagined it would have its ribs. A spurt of blood gouted into the sea, and Maul pressed another button on his gauntlet that would bring other fishermen flocking to the area in case of emergency. He might need other people to form a circle if the blood attracted more sharks.

The animal scissored back and forth gently a few times, as if nothing had happened, but it wasn't gaining ground any more. The beady black eyes held no expression. Maul approached, wishing that he knew more about beast-taming. There were Force users who dedicated themselves to that alone, so it must be a complicated art that he would not be able to learn quickly.

The shark allowed him to approach.

He reached out both hands, the line from the powered harpoon to Maul's shoulder trailing in the water, and almost touched its gills. They looked just like Nautolan gills, pink and red slashes in the brown skin instead of in green. The shark thrashed toward him then, unsettlingly fast, a blur of blue and brown. Its nose and its teeth hit his armored right arm, crunched the metal hard enough that Maul could feel it bind around his forearm and elbow, and retracted. In between, Maul closed its gills with the Force. The shark was weakening from blood loss, but it hadn't punctured his suit and Maul didn't want to give it the chance to do so again. He stepped backward. Its movements became slower, and Maul stared into its eyes. They registered no hopelessness, no malice. Just a mechanical urge to move forward, following a call that the shark gave no evidence of understanding.

Maul felt that way too. It reminded him of his nightmare, his repeated, always-lurking dream.

By this time more Nautolans were arriving, transmitting their happiness for such a large, rare kill through the Force as clearly as if the had radios, and Maul's connection to the beast was gone. He was known as a dour person and so no one took it as anything worth remarking about when he simply reeled the shark in on the harpoon, unclipped it to his back, and helped the other fisherman who pushed forward to tow the kill to the surface.

The ride back was uneventful. When they got to the docks, though, Maul saw immediately that something more exciting than their shark was drawing all the attention on the docks and in the large fish market beyond. Someone was standing on a pier, out on the water (where they couldn't get away if the crowd surged forward in anger, Maul immediately noticed.) The group was made up of mostly Nautolans, with the occasional Anselmi, an unusual sight even in the urban area, and the occasional human. The person on the dock was small and low-slung: a Dug, wearing an orange coat and a low-brimmed red hat.

"What's this?" Catra, one of the leaders of the fishing team, looked toward the Dug as soon as their boat hit the dock. Catra was big and ugly and fair. All of the members of the team except one had taken off their diving helmets as soon as the boat got under way. Maul held his by the breathing tubes on the back, dangling the heavy, round mask.

"They're holding a rally," a Nautolan woman said. "It's anti-human, or something."

Another Nautolan piped up. "There's a few humans over there."

And then Maul saw a picture of Sidious.

Of Palpatine, really - a hand-drawn picket sign, but it was recognizable as the chancellor-turned-emperor's face.

"I'll be back," Maul said, and pulled himself over the side of the boat. The fishers watched him go.

"With the Senate's hands tied in terms of the army, only one person decides the fate of billions of people!" The Dug was saying. It wasn't difficult for Maul to insinuate himself into the crowd, which had, out of respect or simply lack of necessity, not moved onto the pier. "That person clearly discriminates against species other than his own. It's arrogance! It's blindness! And attempts to make him see reason have met with responses shading from political sidestepping to blunt rudeness. We have a galaxy to take care of, Palpatine said. We have to make things better, he said. For who? I say. Not just for humans!"

The crowed roared. Maul found himself in a group of Devaronians, tall, red-skinned beings. A few Zabraks were among them as well.

"What's she talking about?" he asked his neighbor.

"Emperor Palpatine won't allow anyone except humans to serve in the Imperial army," she said. "That's the start of it. There are rumors of more, but we've only got one actual decree to go on right - yeeaaaah!" Her sentence was cut off by another roar from the crowd.

"Who is she?" he asked, indicating the Dug.

"Yujan. She leads this whole thing."

"Could I speak to her?"

"I'm not sure. She might be meeting people after the rally, but she's had to hide out a lot now. Unless you know who to talk to, it can be hard to find her. Because people get angry." She lowered her gravelly voice. "Humans get angry."

There were some humans in the crowd, who seemed just as incensed about Sidious-Palpatine's apparent speciesist stance as any of the Nautolans or Devaronians. Just as Maul was picking them out from the crowd, a hand tapped on his shoulder.

He turned around to see a Zabrak, a tan-skinned woman with thin, brown tattoos like tiger stripes. She had long brown hair that almost covered up her horns. In fact, he could only see two horns on the top of her head, like a Devaronian's but a paler color. However, he suspected that smaller horns were arrayed to either side, covered up by her flyaway hair. That was one strain of Zabrak different from his own. The Jedi Master Eeth Koth also had that horn pattern.

Maul did not know Iridonian Zabrak strains well, though. Their Dathomirian variants were different, mutt breeds, bred by the Nightsisters for strength and subservience, not following any natural pattern that Maul knew.

The woman looked to be about Maul's age. She wore a brown tunic crossed at the neck, brown pants, and a black jacket that covered her arms and hands up to her knuckles. She put one hand on her hip: thin wrist, but a hip lumpy with fat.

"Excuse me," she said. Her voice was low and multi-faceted: it was like it had a thin edge to it, but the core of it was rich. "You look familiar."

Not sure what to say, Maul simply shook his head.

"No, I swear I've seen you before. Do you have a brother who works in Killende?"

Maul must have glared, because she dialed down her chipper tone but did not stop talking. "Or maybe..." she scrunched up her face, as if this possibility was unlikely but she was going to say it anyway. "Are you one of the Surin kids?"

_Yes_ , Maul thought, without quite knowing why. _Yes I am._

What did that mean?

"Surin?"

"Yeah. From...from Dathomir." She looked sad now. She seemed to have some prior knowledge of Dathomir, and that intrigued Maul. He had found Kilindi, or at least, as much of her history as he could, and found closure in the pile of bodies blackened by electric shock and in the wet slap as Kilindi's father hit the ground: what if he now needed to find some part of himself and Savage?

"I...have heard that my parents were from Dathomir," Maul said. "But I have never been there myself."

"Oh! Did you escape?"

"Something like that."

He looked out at the sea again. The Dug was still gesturing, waving her arms. The claws on her padded, leathery fingers were long and black, not grotesque, but neat and predatory. The Zabrak woman got the hint that Maul was a quiet one and did not say anything else. They stood there for a moment, him ignoring her, and then she started to ease away into the crowd, going back to where ever she had come from. He could see a group of Zabraks who were her likely destination. They all had a similar horn pattern and drab clothing.

He had been waiting for her to go. Then, when she did, he could decide whether he wanted her to.

"What do you know about Dathomir?" he said.

She turned around. Her words were more measured now. She had lost her schoolgirl attitude and now talked to him like a business partner. "It's part of why I got involved. I heard what happened to our kinsfolk on Dathomir, and you know what, I did that thing - said to myself, that couldn't happen here. It only happens out on some weird witch planet. But then we hear this." She gestured around. The Dug had finished talking, so the crowd was beginning to disperse, bunching up and dissipating outward at different points.

"And you knew the Surin family?"

"Only by proxy. My friend Talon knows them, or did. He tried to get some people out of Nightsister camps, years ago, but they didn't make it. It might not even have been the same clan of Nightsisters. But Arriette Surin made a note of saying that she wanted help for her three boys. She was...sortof a rallying cry. But she got lost in the shuffle. They're more of a cautionary tale now."

"Indeed," he said. "And Yujan is the rallying cry now."

The Zabrak nodded. "I can take you to meet her. She's going to be behind the fish market."

"I thought she was difficult to find."

The Zabrak shrugged. "Maybe. I know where she's going to be. Do you know where the back booth is? You look like you work in the market."

Only then did Maul think about the fact that he was still wearing his diving suit. The green metal, stained red around the rivets with rust, was easier to walk in for him than it would have been for the other fishermen, since they didn't have mechanical legs. Maul's legs were no secret any more and were in fact a selling point for him when he tried to find work as a fisherman. It would be impossible to fish from the docks in the crowded city, so, for Maul's employer, someone who wasn't afraid of anything, found the ideas of sleeping in and drinking late to be silly, and would naturally sink was a dream employee.

Thanks to those impressive selling points on his resume, he had, through a sort of osmosis more than actually consistently traveling through the market, learned where the back booth was.

More properly it was a row of the last booths before the town started, but it was known colloquially and collectively as the back booth. It was also known as a place thronged with tourists and locals alike, making navigation difficult and, unless you wanted the same fish you could get anywhere else plus the chance to say that you had done it, pointless.

He nodded at the woman.

"Okay," she said. "She's going to be there. You can come with me if you want, but it might take her some time to get out. I don't think she's done with this crowd."

On the dock, the person holding the sign with Sidious' face on it lowered the sign, hand over hand. Someone else reached in and tore a chunk of flimsiplast off the corner.

The Zabrak woman was long-winded but unobtrusive, and Maul quietly followed her through the market while she talked about the rally and stopped to ooh and aah over a dead fish that still had bright yellow eyes on it. As they got farther from the dock she talked more about the fish and less about the rally, and Maul knew that it was because she was less likely to find supporters out here. She was savvy, and he respected that at the same time as he was unpleasantly reminded of the human Kasen's inability to shut up.

It was only during the walk through the market that he thought about how many aliens Sidious had worked with as part of the Sith Order. Sidious had never shied away from working with Mas Amedda, Sly Moore, or the Separatists of varied species. Maul himself, of course, viewed Sidious sometimes like a father because of the kindnesses he had done in between abuses. Sidious' own Master had been a Muun.

Of course, Sidious had planned multiple ways to backstab any or all of these people, as he had so uncharacteristically brutishly demonstrated to Maul the last time they had seen each other. That was Sith nature, though, not racism.

The Chosen One, Anakin Skywalker, whom Maul had only learned about after his time on Lotho Minor, had been human. That thought sank into Maul's mind and rankled.

He found it difficult to identify enough with his own species to join their cause with any emotional fervor, though. He would see what he could do with this miniature army that had formed itself practically in his back yard. The fact that he shared with some of its members a culture that prided itself on the development of the zhaboka was irrelevant.

The two of them did have to wait a little while for the Dug named Yujan to stop being mobbed. The brown-haired Zabrak had just told Maul that her name was Draz Oofan when Yujan arrived looking harried, her batlike ears drooping. The skin inside them was almost transparent, nearly glowing tan under the light of the large market, but the rest of her skin was dark brown and warty. She had taken off her hat along the way and now held it in one hand, revealing a few tufts of hair surrounded by yellow bands that did not seem to serve a purpose. The mane would have stuck up either way.

She stood just outside the market. Maul suspected that she would be moved away by security Nautolans soon. There were only about five supporters there with her in addition to Maul and Draz. One of them was a brown-skinned male Zabrak with tattoos across his cheeks that looked like lightning caught mid-strike. This must have been the man she had mentioned called Talon. Maul wondered whether it was his real name: it almost sounded like a Sith appellation. The tattoos were not just a stylized, jagged lightning bolt either: the white lines were thin until they exploded into small points of light, then changed direction under his eyes and stabbed downward. One petered out near the corner of his lips, while the other meandered across his cheek before ending in a many-pointed explosion and a spear of light. Maul wondered how it had been done. The man's eyes were dark, almost the same color as his skin. He recognized Draz and walked over to her just as someone else, a Nautolan, was starting to speak to Yujan. The lightning-tattooed Zabrak pushed a curtain of white hair away from his eyes before reaching out the same hand, his right, to shake Draz's own proffered right hand.

"This is my friend Talon. Talon, this is..." Draz looked at Maul, then realized that she didn't know his name.

"Maul," he said. It was what he had been going by the whole time he worked for the fishermen. His given title had been devalued to the name it always was anyway. He did not have another one.

"Nice to meet you."

Maul nodded.

"Are you here to speak to Yujan?" Talon asked.

"We are," Draz replied. "Maul wants to join us. We're just waiting until Yujan is freed up."

"I think she is now," Talon said gently, and gestured to where the Dug had been holding court behind them.

When Maul turned, he saw that it was true. There was a gap in the people who had been questioning Yujan.

"Great. Thanks," Draz said to Talon.

"You're welcome."

Maul watched the back of Draz's head as she bobbed toward Yujan. She greeted the Dug politely.

"How are you?" Yujan said. At this distance, Maul could see that Yujan was elderly. Her skin was even more wrinkled than Dug skin was usually, and her yellow eyes were clouded with cataracts. She was standing on a wooden crate in order to be at eye level with the much taller species around her. Although Dugs had long reach, they were built like upside-down crabs, low to the ground.

"I would like to travel with you to Dathomir," Maul said.

"I'm sure Draz told you that this ain't no luxury cruise," Yujan said, not unkindly. "We're going there to see whether we can rally support against the kind of slavery they inflict upon their men. Maybe even to rally support against the Empire." She waited to see how he would respond to such a radical statement.

"I have family there," Maul said. It seemed to work by way of explanation, because Yujan shifted her cheeks around thoughtfully.

"You can go along with us," She said, and then looked at Draz. "We're not all going. Just so you know, Yayak and them are going somewhere else. Another group, the group I'll be with, is splitting off to visit Dathomir. We can't just be preaching to the rich. "

"And the other group?" Draz said.

"I think you know," Yujan said.

At first Draz's eyes widened in surprise, but then she nodded, lips set in a determined line.

"And you?" Yujan turned to look at Maul down the length of her long snout.

"I am not sure."

"If you want to, join us at our ship at 1300 hours tomorrow. It will be in bay 422. Do you think you can find it?"

He nodded. Maul's ship was in bay 354.

When he left the market, he saw his fishing team still on the docks, which were now empty of people. They had laid out the shark. Chunks of it had been cut off to make massive pink steaks. The blood ran back into the sea.

Catra looked up as soon as Maul approached. There was shark blood spattered up and down his bare arms. "What was happening out there?" the Nautolan asked.

"A rally."

"Against the Empire?" Catra shook his head.

Maul nodded.

"You know how they say bravery is a lot like stupidity?" Catra said, and some of the Nautolans behind him piped up with warnings. Don't mess with the Empire. It wasn't worth it.

"They say that the emperor is speciesist."

Catra shrugged. He gave the general impression that it didn't matter to him.

Maul walked along the ocean. There was no natural beach here since it was very industrialized, but the retaining wall was simple and aesthetically pleasing, with gray blocks of stone carefully fitted against one another, and a white railing capping it all. Below the wall he could see places where mud had formed small humps and dunes against the wall. Those were the places where the beaches would form first if the city was ruined by a storm and left to flatten out back to its natural state.

Maul's mind drifted to his dream, to that hazy, lazy feeling of terror.

And then he was dreaming again.

He could not tell whether he had fallen or was still standing, or even walking, and that panicked awareness of how unaware he was of his body added to the disorientation of the sudden flash. Maul had not had a Force-vision before but he had heard of them. This one was happening too fast for him to think much more about it, but it was certainly saturated and surrounded by the Force.

He saw Sidious, arms spread and his robes trailing like the wings of a bird. He was standing over Dathomir: standing with his feet sank invisibly into the galaxy among the stars and glittering nebulas. Maul saw, without any apparent sense of scale, faces looking up at him from the forested ground of Dathomir. They were Zabraks, with skin mostly in shades of red and yellow and orange. Maul thought he recognized his brother - both brothers, although he had never met or experienced either sadness or pity for the youngest brother, Feral. Maul saw blurry faces that in the dream he knew to be his parents, although they were blacked out in the same foggy way as the pillar man from his recurring dream. Occasionally the fog lifted and he saw a flash of horn or a curve of a cheek.

He had the strong urge to find them. Not to save them from Sidious, because Sidious could just as well have been embracing them than leaning down to crush them. But the vision solidified Maul's belief that something in the Force, something of cosmic importance, wanted him to find his family.

And Maul's belief that he himself was, quantitatively, of cosmic importance had never been sufficiently challenged.

He blinked. The faces in his dream shifted, looking at him with bright eyes that shone even through the fog. The Force seemed to stab him between the eyes.

When he came to, he found himself staring at the listless water throwing itself in white peaks against the gray retaining wall. For a moment he was so disoriented that his instinct was to pinwheel his arms, find out exactly how free he was falling. But as soon as he thought about it, he clenched his hands painfully against the hard, grainy surface of the stone railing and realized that he was simply gripping the wall, still standing, but leaning over as if he was looking at something in the sea. He let out one sharp, held breath so hard that it almost hurt his throat and his chest.

The vision felt like an order from Sidious. Perhaps it was from the Force, from the dark side. Either way, Maul liked orders.

And he had a way to go find his family all laid out in front of him. Now, he would just have to go to bay 422.


	8. Chapter 8

It was almost a waste, how easy it would be for Sidious to leave Vader crumpled in a corner. The possibility was so close that it seemed like reality.

Sidious sighed. If he had done his work right, this was how Maul and Vader felt most of the time. Unfortunately for him, Sidious could not have the luxury of getting close to those urges.

Instead, he tried to look at the more socially palatable side of his greatest creation as Vader strode into the amaranthine office that had belonged to Sidious for many years.

There had been a lot of pomp and circumstance as Vader had approached the senate rotunda, but after that the press had been kept away by cordons and guards, and the rest of the affair would be about none of the things that politicos and pundits had speculated over the last few days.

Vader had not come in to Sidious' office since before he had been fused with his suit. Sidious wondered what Vader associated with the place.

"Good day, master." Vader bowed his head and let the dusty edges of his black cloak pool on the carpet.

"You seem to have divided the people."

Vader turned his head as if he could see the senate's entrance hall from the doorway of the office. Sidious' words had made him wince. Anakin could take criticism. Vader was, in many, many ways, more fragile. It was a pity that Sidious had had to ruin his Chosen One in order to tame him.

Vader was all metal and stone, just as Anakin Skywalker had been desert bones and packed sand. Maul, for all his simplicity and single-mindedness, reacted better to stimuli that he could only half see. That was part of why he and Sidious had worked so well together, with some exceptions. Maul took Sidious' slightest suggestions like they were prods. Prods bounced right off him.

Vader, on the other hand, needed lots and lots of prodding.

"I have work for you. My apprentice, Darth Maul..." Sidious let the words trail off so that he could judge Vader's reaction to them. There were none. There would have been if he had mentioned Kenobi in the same sentence, but Maul was just a blip in Anakin Skywalker's history. The Chosen One would only see the perpetual Sith apprentice as an occasional annoyance. "...continues to be inconvenient."

Vader tipped his head like a bird. "There is much work that still needs to be done here," he said, hesitating as much as his forced breathing would allow: Vader was still becoming used to the automation of his own body. He would adjust to the rhythms eventually, succumbing to the cadence of his metal-shrouded lungs.

"You have all but exterminated the Jedi on Coruscant, have you not?"

"On this region of Coruscant. There are others, still many unmapped."

Sidious was not under the illusion that Vader could police the entire galaxy by himself: of course he would need Force-strong lieutenants as time went on. For now, Sidious was curious to see how Vader would handle an excess of gristly work.

"Then make a quick diversion from your task, Lord Vader. You remember Maul."

The black mask inclined downward in a tiny, sepulchral nod.

"Get rid of him. He will be visiting his ancestors on Dathomir soon. Wipe him out."

"How do you know that he will be there, Master?"

The question set off a red flag in Sidious' brain. Vader had taken some of Anakin's good tendencies - tenaciousness, hotbloodedness - and made them not grander but just more inconvenient. Luckily the grandness outweighed those traits.

"Are you jealous, Vader? Do you fear that I may still have an eye on my former apprentice?"

A lack of answer was all the reply he needed.

Sidious let some of his anger show in his voice. He did not have time to deal with his apprentice's petty ... dramas. If Vader did not have conflict with the people around him, he would invent it. Another side effect of Anakin's hot-running emotions that made him so strong in both the light side and the dark side of the Force.

"My question..." Vader rumbled.

Sidious felt piqued, but Vader was not a dog, who would keep crawling back if his master beat him. Vader needed to respect Sidious for any of this to work. The Empire, Sidious knew, would be a lot more difficult to run without Vader.

"I have planted a vision in Maul's mind. He will be pushed inevitably toward Dathomir. Go. Use whatever means necessary."

 _Solve both of our problems,_ Sidious thought. _Kill him in whatever way you wish. Maybe violence will make you feel better. It will for him. It does for me, when I can get the chance._

Sidious wanted the chance to get one more barb in, though. Maybe he would be able to teach Vader a lesson. "And have you had any word of your _own_ wayward apprentice?" Sidious asked.

Vader paused for a moment. So, he would have Sidious believe that he had forgotten.

"The girl," Sidious prodded.

 _Ahsoka._ The name sent shockwaves through Vader's consciousness without Sidious even having to say it. To his credit, Vader did not react outwardly. "There has been no sign of her, Master."

"Fine," Sidious said. _One more Jedi out on the loose in the dark_ , he thought. _One of many. but she had three advantages: she was smart, she was fierce, and she knew Anakin._ If she did not already know that he was Darth Vader now, she might be able to when she sensed his Force presence. Sidious did not imagine that Ahsoka would have gone far, if she had gone off Coruscant at all, since she had been kicked out of the Jedi Temple so reluctantly, and then invited back in, and since the Jedi lifestyle matched her altruistic, warriorlike attitude to a t.

"So be it," Sidious said.

"Is that all, Master?" Vader asked. He put the emphasis on 'all' in a way that sounded condescending to Sidious, like Vader knew that Sidious was trying to goad him by mentioning Ahsoka. Maybe he did. Sidious would be sure to use her name judiciously in the future.

"That is all, Lord Vader."

Vader turned on his heel and walked out into the bright-lit halls in the deep night, his cape swishing. Soon Sidious would follow him. He had a lot of work to do as Palpatine. The residents of the Empire were starting to feel that he was a controlling fist instead of a protective hand, and Sidious would not let them labor under false assumptions very long. Fear would work, fear would strengthen the dark side, and fear would not change whether or not the Empire could be stopped.

* * *

Yujan invited Maul aboard her ship without a fuss. He could bring his own along with her, someone else told him only after she had waved him aboard, but it would need to be slaved to the mother ship, and only Yujan knew where the fleet were going.

Of course, Maul knew - they were going to Dathomir to evangelize to the downtrodden Zabrak and Zabrak-hybrid men. The other crew members and passengers, more like relief workers than soldiers, knew too. But the exact coordinates were, per Yujan's orders, to be held by her along.

When Maul was told this, the Nautolan that told him made it clear that it was second-hand information. Someone had told him to slave his ship and so he had done it, without apparently much reticence on his part. This Nautolan wore a shirt with fringes and had a large tattoo of a snake on his forearm. It was drawn, rather badly but with an attempt at realism, in thick, black ink. He looked like someone who would slave his ship to another ship without thinking much about it.

Maul, however, had to stop and think about what to to with his own craft. It was his own, by now - he almost never thought of Kasen any more. The statue of the goddess still stared, but the couch and the table had been moved to clear the space so that Maul could practice teras kasi there, on the largest patch of open floor on the vessel. The bridge was annoyingly tiny even for one person.

Yujan had literally just waved him in. All around her, Nautolans, Devaronians, and others were bringing boxes of supplies onto the ship. The Dug was sitting on a box, giving orders, answering question after question that crewmembers asked her. She was patient and composed, and no longer wearing a hat. She still had on the red jacket that she had worn previously.

In the end, Maul decided that he would leave Kasen's ship where it was. He could afford to pay the rent, and he did not feel trapped among Yujan's people: he could fight his way out of them if necessary. The ship, while large, was still not so large that a single person could not pilot as long as they were a skilled computer programmer and could make most of the co-pilot's tasks into automated functions. Maul knew how to do that.

Draz found him just as he was wandering another hall, not sure where he was going, half-interestedly taking note of where the strongest points of the ship were and which corners would be good for an ambush. The ship was a large cruiser, but not luxurious: most of the space was taken up by storage and bunks. There were two bedrooms with eight bunk beds each. A few of the beds were not the shape Maul was used to, but a round, hammocklike nest, one over the other, that Maul assumed was more comfortable for Dugs. The beds did not take away the impression that the Dugs were like small, fearsome dog-snakes, but Maul knew that that was not their intent.

"So you decided to join us!" Draz said happily when she encountered Maul in the hallway. As soon as he nodded her affect became more grim, either because she was mirroring his flat expression or because the severity of their situation was upon her. He nodded.

"I hope it helps you find the Surins," she said. "I'm sorry if it was weird that I mentioned that before."

Maul shook his head.

"Okay," Draz said.

They left it at that.

When the ship took off, Maul found that the bunks had not been assigned but simply claimed. He was left with one of the round Dug-beds, which was far too small for him. Instead of playing cards or napping, he walked the halls. No one seemed to mind where he went. There did not seem to be one human on the ship.

He found a storage room and, wondering whether the group had packed any weapons or whether they had not gotten to that stage in their cause yet, poked in. There was a cardboard box with crinkled edges sitting near the door, and he nudged it with his foot just enough to push one of the flaps away from another.

There was a pile of red discs inside the box. Curious, he reached down and opened the box further.

He pulled out of the box a small, sewn patch. On it was a red design like a stylized anchor or a bird with swept wings. Maul had seen that symbol before. The Empire tried not to publicize it, but it was there, every once in a while, in the background of a shot or in the news media that hadn't yet caved to the emperor's demands. Maul held the patch for a moment, just feeling the weave of it, wondering who had brought the pile of them and to what they were supposed to be affixed.

The thing that Yujan had implied that Draz knew about was the fact that the protesters were affiliated with, or soon to be affiliated with, the Rebellion.

Maul nodded. So they had reached _that_ stage. Not yet military, but carefully dipping a toe into the idea of affiliating themselves with a militant group. They had not affixed the patches yet. Maybe Yujan was one of the few people who even knew about them.

Maul knew the stages of rebellion because he had studied it, had sat in front of holograms that showed many, many wars developing from tiny groups of friends like this. First it would be people who knew each other from a club or a workplace, and then it would spread out through HoloNet and word of mouth, gathering mass and coldness like a snowball rolling down hill. Then someone would find a bit of philosophy that justified violence, usually another bit of violence real or perceived, or an unreconcilable difference, and then - people would start bringing home patches, and then they would have a banner to march under. As soon as it became visual the separation of 'us' and 'them' became more and more severe, rolling and cold, an avalanche.

The Empire, which quickly declared that it hated and did not want to liberate its enemies, as so many less sincere regimes termed their conquest, quickly found itself the target of many avalanches.

But the Empire had built many, many high walls.

And Maul, who had discovered himself to be just one stone in that wall, had no lingering sense of coherency left. He was here to find his family. If the Rebellion rolled over the Empire, so be it.

But, on the other hand, he knew that it would not. As he stood in the door to the supply closet he could hear Rebels who did not know they were Rebels playing cards and bickering in various languages, from careful words that sounded almost like Basic to snorts and growls, layered references to cultures Maul could not begin to understand. They were disorganized - and besides, Sidious would have planned for them. He would have planned for the millions of organisms that would come together into this larger organism called the Rebellion. His Chosen One, after all had always been intended as a monster to slay that hero. The patches were clearly hand-made. The Rebellion would just poke at Sidious.

The thought of Sidious actually being threatened just made Maul tired. Perhaps that was because part of him wanted to do the threatening but knew that he could not. He had resigned himself that to return to Sidious meant death. Of course, Maul could fight - the fight-lust rose in him now as it hadn't in a long time. It had been tempered by shark-blood and fish-blood, by the way he had gotten to know the slow, cunning animal intelligences in the Glee Anselm sea. Fighting a person was different now, and Sidious was a predator who operated in an element even more unfamiliar than the open ocean.

He returned to the room filled with bunk beds, where people were sitting around, dangling their legs or claiming places on the floor to talk among themselves. "What about the Senate?" one rebel was saying to another.

"We could petition them, but it would take such a long time. Once we have more people, with more influence, I'm sure we'll send someone to run that angle. But right now, because of the bureaucracy, it just seems like common sense to do the good we can do at the time."

"You might be able to do greater good for a greater amount of people, even if it takes more time, if you go to the senate," said the petite Devaronian woman. She spoke slowly, as if she was working the words out.

Maul found them dull, so he ignored them and passed through to the next room, which was closer to the bridge. There were people sitting everywhere, and it did not seem like all of them knew each other. They had a common cause, but there was some initial awkwardness in their interactions which made him believe that their alliance so far had been brief. No one paid attention to one man wandering the halls - many other people were doing the same, with various degrees of grumpy or sinister aspect too.

It seemed to call into question Maul's idea of his own cosmic importance, but the Force told him otherwise. The Force always reassured.

In the end, he slept through much of the trip , despite Draz's occasional attempts at friendship. She seemed stymied when he told her that he did not actually know where his family was, and that he hoped to maybe find them on Dathomir. He told her that he had been employed for some time as a fisherman, a topic which bored both of them, and he refused to tell her anything about his life beyond the fact that he was an itinerant. Eventually she stopped trying, although it was less that she gave him the cold shoulder and more that she was distracted by more interesting, more open people who also wished to make friends on the long trip to Dathomir.

The flight took nearly three weeks, since Dathomir was all the way on the other side of the galaxy, literally. Multiple times, the ship needed to stop for fuel. Maul overheard Yujan saying once that the space lanes were actually more empty of pirates than they had been before the Emperor had declared his law to extend all throughout the former sway of the Republic. Even crime syndicates like the Hutts, who had whole star sectors of their own, seemed to be hushed while they waited to see what stance the Empire would take toward them and what it would do once they continued their operations.

Maul exercised, mostly, during the flight. He had lost some of his skill at martial arts while he was a fisherman, and he got the chance to spar with live people on the ship. He had not stopped practicing on Glee Anselm, but practicing by himself was almost useless after a while. Even if he shadowboxed, it was never the same as fighting a live person who could be unpredictable. He found sparring partners among the rebels and quietly, and without the Force, bested them repeatedly. It helped him learn, and he became known as the muscle of the group.

That was why Yujan called him to talk to her one day.

It wasn't a secret discussion. There was hardly enough room on the ship for a secret discussion to take place. Maybe there would have been if there were fewer people on the ship, but for now, Yujan called him to her in the common room. She was wearing a plainer outfit now, navy blue with a vest, but she still had claws that looked impractically long and catlike.

"I hear that you're gaining a reputation as a good fighter," she said.

He bowed his head, looked back up. He had brought new clothes at one of the stop overs for fuel and now wore new black pants and a black tunic (it was easy to get the more obvious bloodstains out of black clothing) and a heavy brown jacket with a rounded collar that crinkled around his neck when he moved. He didn't like the collar at all, but it made him sure that he could blend in with smugglers or spacers anywhere.

"That's good," Yujan said. "And don't worry that I'm going to assign you to anything." She bit at the words angrily, occasionally sending a fine spray of spit into his face that made him shift backward. Her tone, however, was not angry. "I just like to know what's going on. And I wanted to offer you a deal. We're going to set a group down in the Nightbrothers camp. It'll all be Zabrak men like yourselves, so the Nightsisters won't see it as any type of invasion - or at least, so we hope. Another group of us will go to the Nightsisters council in that region and actually talk to them. Would you be willing to be part of that advanced group?"

"Why would you need fighters there, instead of in the place where you are more likely to face resistance?"

"I won't lie to you - it will be more about how you look than your skill. If you have to hide, you'll blend in better than, say, I would."

"Why would we have to hide? I want to know more about your plan first."

Yujan sighed, looked away. "It wouldn't be right if I didn't tell you. The Empire got to Dathomir first. They haven't approached this particular clan, but the clans know there are outsiders about, and they don't like it."

"No they're not," Maul said.

Yujan tipped her head.

Maul had to back up to realize what he had said. Yujan's words - the Empire is on Dathomir - had sparked something in him, an absolute certainty that she was wrong. He would have sensed if the Empire was on Dathomir, he thought. He would have sensed Sidious' hands in all of this. He had never sensed something from so far away before, though, and that got him wondering whether he was wrong.

"Or maybe they are..." he mused, regretting already that he had said any of it out loud. He had been among gregarious people for too long.

"Are you okay?" Yujan asked.

"You're lying to me." As soon as those words came out, Maul knew that he was certain about that part.

"What?"

"You're lying. I..." Can sense it, he wanted to say. But then she would leap to the conclusion that he was a Jedi, and - she would like that, would't she? The idea of having a mystical warrior on their side would certainly help the proto-rebellion. But it would be messy. People would begin to feel like they were trapped on the ship with him. "I can tell."

"Hmm," Yujan said calmly. "Listen, it's not that I'm lying. I didn't have the plan halfway formed before we started out, because something might have changed on the way. But I have more planned for when we get there than I've told all of you - nothing different, just something more." She looked around, sighed again. She hadn't planned on talking about this but didn't mind if people heard. A few, the ones who had been around her before she had called Maul over, and others, looked between the two of them. "I want to recruit the Nightsisters to the Rebellion."

"The Rebellion," a Devaronian breathed.

"Yes." Yujan raised her voice, looking over and around Maul at more and more people who were paying attention, getting into the rhythm of her speech now and proclaiming confidently the thoughts that she had probably been turning over and over in her head over the last fourteen days and nights. "First of all, I want you all to know that I've been in talks with the leaders of the Rebellion. I won't give you names, but they're gathering people and forming a network. If any of you have any ideological differences with the Rebellion, you're welcome to voice them."

People were gathering behind Maul now, forming a half-moon around Yujan. She continued speaking. "I know a lot of the people working in the Rebellion are humans. Its leaders...well, I know they're sympathetic to our cause."

She waited for people to raise their hands, to protest. There were mutters behind Maul, and he didn't like the fact that, if she wanted, Yujan could blame him for this in some way: he was literally in the middle of it even though he hadn't started it. Yujan had used him to nip rumors in the bud and so she had drawn him into this.

He kept quiet.

In the end, the proto-Rebels decided to go along with her plan. She had to explain it first, and so the gathering became something more formal, more hushed and tensed. People gathered in the common room around her still held sabacc cards or digital readers in their hands, fussing at flimsiplast and thick plastic alike, rubbing away the dirt.

Yujan explained. One group would ingratiate themselves with the Zabrak men, talking about freedom. The other would speak to the women, try to reason with them and get them to join the Rebellion. Maul nodded along. This worked for him, if he wanted to find his family. Names probably passed along the matriarchal line in Dathomiri-Zabrak society, but the men would be more likely to remember the goings-on in their small community.

Savage had explained to him that not all Nightsisters lived the same way his tribe did, and most tribes did not even communicate with each other very often. The Nightsisters made sure that neither sub-society became inbred through keeping elaborate records (or so Maul assumed. Savage had never looked into that aspect of things.)

Apparently another rebel knew something similar. "Which clan are we visiting?" a female voice said.

"The Nightbrothers," Yujan said, and that seemed to explain it to the other woman.

"Why them?" Another group asked. "There are friendlier clans."

"That's part of the reason," Yujan said without hesitation. "We need people who will fight. The Nightsisters are fierce."

This prompted more muttering, but Yujan pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes and flattened her ribbed bat-ears to her head, and no one challenged her.

(Rule by fear, Maul learned later, can happen anywhere. It is not always orchestrated, it is not always organized.)

After that, the group went back to playing cards and talking. Some resentment simmered. Some people, Yujan announced without either sullenness or sadness, got off at the next fuel stop, not willing to take the plunge into the Rebellion, or perhaps not willing to ally themselves with a group lead, supposedly and if the rumors were true, by humans.

And the next stop was Dathomir.

Maul knew that the only person who really knew him on this planet was Mother Talzin, and since she was one of the only surviving members of the Nightsisters clan, Yujan was going to have to be careful that she didn't walk into a whole mess of inter-clan warfare when she arrived on Dathomir. That was also the first time Maul thought about how weak the clan would be. There would be a lot of men, who knew how to fight in theory, but had never really gone to war. Their fighting was more a sort of display, and Savage had not given his clan a very good name compared to the power of the Sith. The Nightsisters did not develop their Force sensitivity, seeing it simply as a side effect of magic that used hallucinogenic herbs as much as it did anything with actual transformative properties, so even Force-strong ones would be weaker than Maul. Yujan might just find a ghost town. The Nightsister buildings that Maul remembered were barely distinguishable from natural forms by the untrained eye anyway.

He did not tell Yujan any of this. Helping her miniature rebellion to succeed was not why he was here, and he needed to get to his clan to try to find his parents - or at least his father.

When the time for the mission came, Maul was chosen to go with the group to the Nightbrothers. The other two members of the group seemed to have done evangelism of this type before. Maul had, he supposed, been chosen simply because he looked the part.


	9. Chapter 9

Maul and two other Zabraks stood near the airlock as the ship came into Dathomir airspace. To Yujan's knowledge, no one knew that the Rebel ship had arrived. The planet's atmosphere was dark red and rusty, a bloody mist wafting along even the ground. One of the other Zabraks was Talon, the man Maul had been introduced to before, but Draz was either going with the women's group or not at all, and Maul did not bother to ask which. The third person in the group was a tan-skinned Zabrak with short, black hair and Iridonian horns. His tattoos were three green slashes on each side of his face, like the reverse of Nautolan gills, along the top of his cheeks. Maul hadn't encountered him much over the course of the flight, but he seemed sociable, and smiled at the other two as they waited for the door to open. He introduced himself as Bao-tan, and spelled it.

"Good luck, delegates," Yujan said over the comm. Draz had called them something less formal and more affectionate earlier - bait, pretty boys, sacrificial lambs.

The airlock opened, letting in humid, clammy wind. Maul just saw treetops. The three Zabraks gripped the emergency handholds on the walls of the airlock as the ship lurched suddenly downward, and then there was a clearing, and grayish brown dirt under the fog, and Bao-tan shrugged and jumped out of the ship.

The other two followed. Maul landed lightly on his feet. Talon was flat-footed and heavy but did not stumble, and Bao-tan seemed to have a childish energy, but also not so much independence that it got in the way. He looked back at the others after he had progressed a few steps through the clearing, making sure they were keeping up. For the first time, Maul felt like an old man next to him. Bao-Tan had to be little older than twenty. Talon was younger than him too, Maul was sure, although he didn't think of himself as over fifty.

Behind him, the wind whipped and the engine roared as the ship waited for them to get a little farther away. The Zabraks followed a clear path through the forest.

The Nightbrothers' architecture was all blocky and cold stone. They patrolled themselves: or at least, two yellow-skinned men wearing woven shirts and long, leather wraps like kilts met them at the first gate they came too. The guards were armed with spears.

As soon as he saw them, Bao-Tan walked more slowly so that Maul and Talon caught up with him and he could speak quietly to them. "Do we say 'take me to your leader' now, or...?"

 _Their leaders may not be alive,_ Maul thought. And there was a good chance that the Nightbrothers could hear the whispers.

Talon shook his head. "We'll feel the area out. Take what we find."

Maul nodded. Bao-Tan said, "Okay," and shrugged. Maul had the feeling that the younger Zabrak's tendency to run his mouth was going to be a problem along the way. He almost looked forward to leaving the kid to the wolves.

They arrived at the gate within a few moments.

The men at the gate did not level the spears. Instead they simply looked calmly at the newcomers.

"Who are you?" One of the guards asked. He looked like Savage, Maul thought. The guardsman had wide shoulders and a wide face, with round brown eyes. He wore a black fur cloak that almost hid his sleeveless shirt. Maul did not think that the weather would affect him much if it usually stayed like this, balmy and wet but not raining. Maul did not know what storms lashed Dathomir.

"Representatives from the galaxy," Talon said.

"We know the galaxy." The guardsmen looked at each other.

"And...?"

Talon waited for them to say more, but they were more patient than he was, and simply blinked. There was an awkward silence, backed by the acknowledgement that there was some kinship shared here, some mutual good-will between words.

"Take us to your leader?" Bao-Tan tried.

"What clan are you from?" asked the second guard, tipping his head quizzically.

Talon and Bao-Tan looked at each other.

Maul said, "Surin."

The burlier guard nodded at his companion. "Take them in. Bring them to Mufsat and Hadokar Surin."

Maul could not be sure whether Mufsat was supposed to be a a single name or also to go with Surin. The fact that he would find his parents here hadn't really fazed him, but now it was like a heavy rock falling into still water. The ripples kept expanding.

The gates opened in front of the four Zabraks, the thick stone scraping at the ground. The four of them walked through the village. Everyone there seemed to be working at something. The first man they saw was turning a gear that opened the gate. Others were practicing staff fighting, or tilling small, almost comically small gardens. Maul couldn't be sure how anyone could feed a village from even many of those small patches of greenery, only a few feet square.

Mufsat met them almost immediately. He was orange-skinned, with radiating tattoos like tiger stripes. His arms were tattooed too, the same sort of stripes ringing his forearms and becoming smaller, tighter circles until arrows crawled onto the back of his hands. He had a bald head with small, Iridonian horns but a thick, foot-long ponytail lashed with a leather thong at the back of his head, and a five-o'clock shadow. He scowled as soon as he saw the newcomers.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Delegates from the galaxy," Talon said.

"What part of the galaxy?" Mufsat demanded.

Talon glanced at Maul. "Our last stop was Glee Anselm. We're here to make people aware of the Empire's speciesism."

"What Empire is this? The Lowland Country? The Red Birds?"

"The Galactic Empire," Talon said. It sounded like he was losing patience. Meanwhile, Mufsat was holding in a smirk. Maul knew that there was something of a politician in the other man since he was making an effort to hold it in at all, but he wasn't very good at it. Other Zabrak men were gathering around them, talking loudly and gesturing without any effort to hide their curiosity. Beside them, Mufsat was a statue in comparison. Maul thought about how many of them he could kill before he had to grab a weapon.

"Coruscant has nothing to do with us," Mufsat said. "I know you might not understand that, so let me explain the scale of it to you. A native born-Dathomiri hasn't left this planet in generations. We have our own wars and our own universities. We have libraries no one from another planet has ever seen...or so the Nightsisters tell us. And we have enough of our own problems, delegates."

"A native has left," Maul said.

Mufsat flicked his gaze to him. He had large, alert eyes, brown specked with a gold that was so light and reflective it was almost white.

Bao-Tan cocked a thumb at Maul. "He's a Surin."

As savvy as they were, the Nightbrothers had a near obsession with family. A man who had been lost and then returned to the fold was practically a savior without having done anything to earn or prove the title. He had gone out into the world of women, survived, and wanted to come back. He must hold some arcane knowledge.

Maul feared they they would want him to somehow prove that. He wouldn't even be able to answer any questions. He turned the name of his relative over in his head - Hadokar. It did not mean anything to him.

Talon jumped on the opportunity. "You said that only the Nightsisters know about the library. That's part of what we want to solve," he said. "Your people are oppressed too. If you come with us, you could help us bring other people out of that kind of oppression."

Someone handed Mufsat a cigarette. He took it from a jet-black hand, and only after Mufsat had gently taken a lighter from out of one of the pouches at his belt did Maul look up to see the person who had handed it to him. This man was a blotchy-skinned Zabrak. Yellow and red swirled around his skin underneath a complicated full-face tattoo. He had placid brown eyes that blinked slowly as Maul looked up at him.

Mufsat said, "Thank you, Hadokar," and lifted the burning cigarette to his own lips. Hadokar was holding one as well but did not light it.

So this was the Surin. When Maul looked at him, Hadokar did not particularly acknowledge his stare, instead looking evenly between the three Zabraks.

"What do you actually want? How many men?" Mufsat asked.

"As many as you can send."

"You know that the Nightsisters won't allow it."

"We have another delegation talking to them," Talon said. Now that he had gotten attached to that word "delegate" he seemed to really like it.

The Dathomirian Zabraks looked from one to another, perhaps skeptically. Maul could not read their expressions. Hadokar's Force presence was hard to read also, because he was very calm. Perhaps his emotions would show only when he was in the very thick of them. That might have been a trait that Maul had inherited, Maul thought quietly.

But then the Sith scoffed at himself, without making a sound. He did not know that Hadokar was the father of Savage and the third brother. If this society was as oppressive as it seemed, Hadokar might not even know the names of the mothers of his children. They would have simply arrived, done what they had came to do, and left, off to make marks in their books of genetics and family lineages.

"If that even makes a difference," Mufsat said, sounding more regal and dismissive than he had before, "it will take them time to come to a decision anyway. Meanwhile..."

Then, Hadokar Surin finally spoke. "He must prove himself to us," he said.

He was staring straight at Maul. Bao-Tan nudged Maul's upper arm with his own elbow, and Maul snarled and snapped at him. This simply made Hadokar smile in something like fondness or amusement. Whatever it was, there was a tinge of arrogance in it too.

Maul's first thought was of what the Rebel so-called delegates would do if he decided at this moment that he didn't care enough to undergo a trial in order to help them.

Except that he did care. He wanted to know what this man knew about Savage. He wanted to show him that his son was stronger than he was, and that his son was dead.

Maul said, "How?"


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the bulk of this fic before "Son of Dathomir" came out, and therefore you'll see some stuff that, like Kilindi, is no longer considered canon. However, I've taken that into account and will include more "Legends" material later. This fic exists, as it was written, between the two canons.

Bao-Tan and Talon were left behind. They had a corner to sit in, which Mufsat insisted was not a cell. They were free to go wherever they wanted, as long as it was not with Maul.

"We're killing time," Mufsat said directly to Talon, ignoring the jittering Bao-Tan, leaning in close as if to make the information confidential even though Maul was standing close beside them. "We have to wait to see what the Nightsisters to do. But for now, we're curious."

Hadokar shouldered into the group. He was carrying something - not a weapon, but some kind of machine. Maul saw a small gear, and then traced the line of the metal piece to discover that it was some kind of leg trap, used to capture a large animal. Hadokar also had a rope slung over his shoulder and a commlink in his hand. "Time to go."

"Is he really your son?" Bao-Tan said, and absolutely everyone looked at him. Maul, Talon, Mufsat, Hadokar - it seemed like the camp went still. No one snarled. Hadokar sighed.

"How much do you know about our people?

Bao-Tan stared at him.

"I have no sons," Hadokar said. "The women, my mates, may have sons. But none of them are allowed to be mine. Time _to go._ " Now he sounded angry. Maul moved smoothly to his side, peering sidelong at the other man's eyes but very much doubting that he would answer any more questions after the way he had answered Bao-Tan. Maul wanted to ask whether that was true, or whether Hadokar simply did not want to stoop to answer the useless curiosities of a whelp like Bao-Tan.

But he did not. He followed Hadokar away from the others, out toward the gate. As they left, Maul heard Talon offer to tell Mufsat more about the Rebellion.

A few other hunters joined Maul and Hadokar's party, bringing with them traps and other large, unidentifiable devices slung over their shoulders. Maul still had his small blaster, but felt no need to show it off.

Hadokar was much taller than him, so Maul had to crane his neck to look up at the older man.

"You broke your legs?" Hadokar said without looking at him.

"I..." Maul tipped his head.

"You walk strangely." Hadokar was still staring at the gate, once flicking his gaze toward the gatehouse that Maul now saw was built against a wall like a remora latched onto its host. The other hunters, three Dathomirian Zabraks who had been silent so far, angled toward the gatehouse.

"My legs are mechanical," Maul said. "I lost them in a fight."

"Huh."

Hadokar stopped at the gatehouse. "We'll make our marks," he said. A man inside the gatehouse handed out a digital tablet. He was young, practically a boy, with yellow skin and no tattoos. Although he had no hair either, the shape of his body was skinny and androgynous.

The hunters got in line to make small pictograms with their fingers, complicated little symbols that were not quite words and not quite letters, on a grid laid out on the tablet. When Hadokar quirked his thumb at Maul, the boy inside the gatehouse drew the tablet inside, turned it around so that the hunting party could see it, and thumbprinted a third box. A square symbol with a pattern inside it appeared in white on the navy blue background.

Hadokar watched the last stamp with extra care. "That means visitor," he told Maul.

So the Nightsisters would know that people from offplanet had been here. Maul wondered how ofter the Nightsisters checked the roster. It didn't matter whether one of them visited once a day or once a week, thought - Yujan would be doing her job over there and would receive a yes or a no along the way.

"Do you have many visitors?" Maul said.

Hadokar said, "No."

They walked outside the gates. The other hunters looked around warily. Perhaps, Maul thought, they were enjoying their rare moment of freedom.

"You have questions," Hadokar said quietly.

'I don't,' Maul almost wanted to answer. He almost wanted to explain the feeling he had that the questions came not from him but from outside him, from whatever the Force had meant by killing his brother and turning his Master against him.

"Tell me abut my brothers."

"If you are my son, then Feral and Savage were my sons also. They don't let us know which sons belong to which fathers, Maul. I could only guess from the color of their skins." He flecked his splotched hands and turned them over and over. "They were a good team. Savage protected his brother. They were unusually close, but we all thought that Feral's reliance on his brother would cause him trouble one day. I guess it did."

"I don't know what happened to him," Maul said.

"Neither do any of us. One day, the women just took them away."

None of his words had any emotional resonance with Maul. The color of the sky and the smell of the sap of the leaves the hunting party crushed under their collective feet did not create any particular feeling either. Maul's childhood was Coruscant and Orsis, not this, and to think that he would have any greater emotional connection to Hadokar Surin than he had to Darth Sidious, when Sidious had been the one who fed and clothed him, should not, he realized with a slight surge of disappointment, come as a shock.

"Is that all?" Hadokar asked.

"What must I do to prove myself?"

Hadokar laughed. "This is mostly a delaying tactic. Don't attack any of us. Try to be slightly more than useless. There is no ritual. We wanted to separate you from your friends so that we could compare your stories." Hadokar stopped and sighed. Maul let the silence settle. It seemed like Hadokar was not used to speaking this much, and had to take a moment to realize that he actually needed to. "I would be lying if I said I wasn't more curious about you as a person than about your rebellion. But we will find out, won't we?"

"I have been working as an assassin," Maul said. Surely these men would not see that as any more egregious a crime than hunting for animals.

Hadokar shook his head. "Do you see much industry here? We are kept inside our fortress walls. The Nightsisters know who goes in and out. Sometimes one of us will find that we're better at hunting or sewing rends in clothes or telling stories, but we don't have an economy, Maul. I don't care what your job is. I care what you are like." He looked at Maul. "Hunting will show me that."

Maybe there was some ritual to this, Maul thought. Maybe it was ritual to tell the victim that there was nothing ritual about the process.

As they walked, Maul realized that this was the same trail that he had walked with his two rebel companions when he had first come here. They had landed right where the Nightbrothers baited their prey. He hoped that that didn't prove to be appropriate symbolism. The trees had both green and red leaves, in a combination of seasons that confused Maul. The hunters talked and grumbled among themselves, quietly.

He watched as Hadokar and the other men set the traps. They were large jaw-traps, which were set on the ground and covered with leaves. When an animal stepped into the circle of metal, the spring-loaded circle would clamp together, breaking the animal's leg or piercing it with the sharp teeth set into the circle. Some of the springs were different sizes, and some of them looked like they had come from starships. From what Hadokar said, the Nightbrothers did not have many items or opportunities to trade with outsiders, and would probably have had to learn to patch and repair their tools many times over instead of relying on a supply of new ones. The Nightsisters did note exactly stock a general store. That would explain some of Savage's simplicity, as well as the way that, although he did not understand starships, indeed considered them as magical as if they had operated by teleportation, he had a basic knowledge of mechanical things.

Maul looked around as the hunters quietly went about this work. He could hear roars and squarks in the distance, through the thick forest. There were beasts in these forests, large and small, tooth and fang and scales. The mandibles, the metatarsals. Maul bared his own teeth in response, remembering the snake he had fought on Bandomeer, the same as creatures he had fought before, in the depths of Coruscant or stranger places. He watched them set the traps, feeling patient instead of useless, watching the light from the yellow and orange lanterns and the fading day on the red skin of his father.

Just as the primitive animal traps were starting to take shape, something like a noose and something else like fangs, Maul sensed someone behind him. It was as clear as a vision, that someone was sneaking behind him. He moved slowly back into the forest, but the hunters were well trained and attuned - as soon as he stepped on a leaf three heads switched toward him.

"Someone is following us," he said.

He got three yellow-brown stares. His father looked from one to the other, confrontational, the skin between his eyes wrinkling. He curled his lip, showing one yellowing, flat tooth.

Maul felt the skin on his back prickle, gooseflesh rising although he couldn't sense anything and did not have any fear to use to amplify his Force sense.

The moment he glanced behind him, an arm snaked around his neck and he was jerked backwards.

The other three Zabraks instantly turned, but two were bent over setting traps and bait on the ground, and Hadokar had no weapon. The arm was thick; Maul could feel the bulge of muscle against his throat. The person to whom the arm belonged was smaller than him, though, which made it easier for them to throw him off balance. As soon as he pressed against the person, he knew that it was a woman. She pulled him backward into the forest quickly, using a large red plant as cover, but as soon as they were behind the plant Maul dug his heels into the dirt and got ready to try to duck under her arm.

The woman threw something with her left arm; he saw it whip past his peripheral vision, but still could not sense what she was going to do next with the Force. Her presence was calm and fierce, but, Maul could tell now, she was actively preventing him from foreseeing her next move - she had been trained by someone in the higher arts of the Force.

She had thrown a smoke grenade. It exploded on the other side of the clearing, and Maul could sense the hunters looking toward it. Hadokar would find him in a moment if he didn't go completely off track, though, Maul knew.

The woman whispered, "I think I'm your mother."

Maul stilled, and the witch laughed.

"Come with me," she said, "and I'll answer your questions about your family."

Fear introduced itself into the woman's distinct presence, and Maul knew then that she wasn't sure that her words would be sufficiently intriguing to stop him from fighting her. She could be anyone. She might or might not know what he had been searching for this whole time.

But her wrist, where he could see a sliver of skin between a black sleeve and a black glove, was red.

Maul just grunted, but it was enough assent. She let him go. He spun around. She jumped backward a long way, landing beside a tree, gesturing with a wide sweep of her arm for him to come with her. "Hurry. I'll bring you back when we're finished."

Hadokar was close beside them now. Maul could see another smoke grenade on the woman's belt. He grabbed it with the Force, sending it sailing across the forest into his left hand, then spun, found and thumbed the activation stun, and whipped the grenade into the clearing. It would have nearly hit Hadokar in the face. Maul heard a strangled shout.

The woman turned and bounded through the forest, and Maul followed her.

He felt clumsy next to her. She clearly knew the terrain, knew which piles of leaves were stable and which hid lower ground, knew which angle of rocks to spring off of. She was dressed almost entirely in black, with black strips of cloth wrapped around her legs over her pants, and her head hooded. Maul had caught a glimpse of red skin and brown eyes before she turned away. He could not yet see whether she had any horns, or in what pattern.

She brought him to a hovel in the woods. It appeared to be made out of sticks cemented together with mud. He was almost out of breath by the time they arrived, simply by how much attention he had had to pay to his footing to move through the forest at that speed. They had left Hadokar and his gang far behind, but Maul could still dimly sense them, and resolved to keep track of them in the Force just in case he would have to deal with an impromptu reunion of his parents.

"What do you want from me?" he asked as the woman ducked into the hovel.

He followed her into a workshop. A hammer and mortar and pestle sat on a tiny workbench next to the skull of something long-jawed with predatory teeth. Piles and scraps of cloth teetered throughout the house. There were piles of things all around, but as far as living went Maul could only see the workbench, a fire pit on the far wall which was now filled only with ashes, and a red couch covered with a red, orange, and brown woven blanket.

The Force surged, and the woman pulled the hammer to her from across the room. It smacked into her right palm. With her left hand she pulled down her hood, revealing short black hair and Iridonian horns. Closer, Maul could see the lines on her face, but she had a pert chin and lean jowls that made her look younger than the at least sixty standard years she had to be.

"You can use the Force." he said. "How were you not taken by the Jedi?"

She looked at him quizzically, seeming not to understand the word. Maul was surprised that the Jedi would not send anyone to search for Force-sensitives on such a Force-rich planet on Dathomir, but he moved on from that topic, next asking, "What about my father? Was he...like us?"

"Hadokar cannot use the Force," she said. "Few of the men can."

"But you hid from me in the Force," Maul said. His voice was getting quieter now, more threatening. He wondered whether he would have to kill her to get back to Talon and the other rebels. He wondered whether it would be worth the trouble. She might refuse to answer his questions. But surely, in this matriarchal society, his civilized mother would know more than his barbarian father. On the other hand, this meant she was more likely to lie. Even quieter still, he said, "Do you expect me to trust you?"

"Have you trusted anyone, lately?" she said, and he almost shook his head before he realized that she was faking. He could sense the _lack_ of prophecy. She was just throwing out phrases and seeing what stuck, now.

" _Explain yourself,"_ he said.

She narrowed her eyes. "I see that you won't be distracted. There is a reason why I found you. We were warned that you were coming, because others were likewise warned."

His mother set something on the table. It was a tiny projector, more high tech than he had expected to see in this hovel that was practically a parody of a witch-doctor's home.

She showed him a hologram. In the flickering blue image, Maul saw a man walking at the head of a column of stormtroopers. A cape flowed behind him, and he had long legs and a barrel chest, but there was something inhuman about his shape. Maul had to fight to see the recognizable features: the curve of the man's back as the cape flapped away from him, the short reverse curve of the neck. The head was covered with a helmet forged roughly in the shape of human features, but an unrecognizably militant and almost animal-like shape was conveyed even more clearly by the hooked ridge hanging down from the back of the helmet, the black bug eyes like a pilot's goggles, and, strangest of all, the severe triangular shape of the wall that passed for the person's mouth.

Maul wished that he could sense the man's Force presence, but not even the strongest Sith or Jedi could do that when the image he was looking it was a recording. If it was even a minute old, it would no longer match up to who the person in the image really was any more, and would be useless for identification by Force sense. Whoever this man was now, he had learned and experienced more things, even if they took just seconds of his life, that would change the sight/touch/taste/sound/smell of his Force presence.

"Who is that?" Darth Maul narrowed his eyes. It was the pillar man, or as close as he had ever seen in the galaxy.

"Darth Vader," his mother said.

"I know that name."

"You follow the news?"

Regardless of whether she was his mother or not he was not going to tell her of the half-formed sensation he had had during his whole time on Glee Anselm, of a desire to stay away from the Empire. "Something like that," he said quietly.

"He is here," she said. "On this planet."

"I must find him."

"For yourself, or for the Rebellion?"

"For..." Maul paused, wondering how she knew what the Rebellion even was. Half of Yujan's people didn't.

"I know that your friends from the galaxy outside this planet want us to join the Rebellion. Don't fear that you are somehow ruining it by becoming an accidental diplomat. Yujan doesn't know you're here."

"You know her?"

"I met with her at our homestead. A lot of us did."

"How many witches are there?"

"Dozens," his mother said. "We all gathered, not just the regional council."

"You recovered after the Separatists attacked," Maul said.

"We will not recover fully until the next generation. We have had to be very careful," Now she looked angry, the skin around her face wrinkling.

"That is not important right now. The important thing here is that this meeting, between us, has nothing to do with the meeting between Yujan and the tribal leaders. Do you understand?"

Maul nodded.

"Nor is it about you and I as family."

"We can agree on that," Maul said.

"You need to be aware of what Darth Vader is."

He was surprised that she was so eloquent, and did not stop to think about what that meant about his assumptions about the people who lived in the wild forest of Dathomir. He did not think he was missing any information about what Darth Vader was. He was another dark Force user, probably plucked from another hovel. Maybe Sidious had found the Chosen One, and Maul was due to pledge allegiance at his feet...although he did not want to be a stranger's servant.

"He is a human," the Nightsister his mother said. "He comes from a land where men rule, where they are taught that other people and other species are beneath them. This assumption makes them strong, but also cruel. Here, the women are strong and cruel. So we understand."

Maul waited. She didn't say anything more. "Is that all you know?" he asked.

"Yes. His mind is strange."

She had told him nothing that Maul did not already know about the pillar man - but she had been incredibly important in _identifying_ the pillar man. He was a Sith, and one who had risen fast in the ranks if he had already gained the Darth title from Sidious. A few moments after thinking that Maul felt jealousy start to rankle within him. Maybe this was the Chosen One.

And maybe he wasn't of Sidious' lineage at all, but simply a self-styled warlord who had chosen to come to Dathomir because it was small and Force-rich. No one had outright said that Darth Vader was associated with the Empire - no one who would actually know what the Empire was.

Maul shook his head, but now his first priority was to get out of here and face Vader himself. "Do you know where he is?"

"He's coming soon. Look at the trees in the holo." Again, she was assuming that Maul knew something that he did not. She pointed at the foliage, moving her long fingers from branch to branch. "These grow near the Nightbrothers' enclave."

"I must find him," Maul said. He almost stood up. He had wasted too much time here. But...she was his mother. She did not know what her sons' lives had been like, and either did not care or resisted asking. He had a feeling it was the latter. She had self-discipline beyond even his own, and it had not been trained into her except by the loss of her sons. "What is your name?" he asked.

"Zanja."

"Did you have any daughters?"

She looked at him shrewedly, wondering about the change of topic, then relaxed, realizing that he was genuinely curious and making conversation. "No," she said.

So all her children had been sent away to become breeding stock. He could understand why she had become sad and bitter.

"I let you go," she said. "Not because you were boys, although that was part of it. I let you go because it was my job to give to the next generation. That is what we are raised to do, as Nightsisters - prophesy and give. You..." She peered closely at him. "I think you prophesy and take. Both are needed in the world."

"I do not prophesy," he said.

"I missed you," she said. "But I knew you were going to a better life than Feral and Savage were, and I knew that you would become something stronger than either them or myself.

His mother bent over the fire and watched him, golden specks in her brown eyes, orange light reflecting on her cheeks and forehead, as he left. "Go," she said. "Maybe one day you can come back. For now, Darth Vader is descending on your rebel friends, and you're curious. I can see it. Go."

He stood up, brushed the dust from his knees (how was Zanja not covered in dust? The hovel seemed to shed it constantly) and left, being careful not to step on any of her crowded possessions on the way.

As soon as he got more than a few meters into the forest he figured out why his father hadn't tracked him. The Nightbrothers had other things to deal with. Smoke was rising over the tops of the trees.


	11. Chapter 11

Later, history would remember this as one of the first strikes the Empire ever took against a neutral planet. Even later than that, history would forget it entirely. Dathomir would be swathed in its fog and ignore the Empire as thoroughly as the Empire ignored it, focusing on its own wars and politics.

Those same studies would also reveal that Darth Sidious had mounted this attack on Dathomir not to wipe out its largely Force-sensitive population, nor to make a xenophobic statement, nor even to fight the tiny, disorganized band of Rebels who would later, believing the Rebel leadership under Bail Organa, Leia Organa, and Mon Mothma to be too human-centric, split off into a less radical nonhuman rights group. Darth Sidious had arranged this attack in order to finally get rid of Darth Maul, and to test Darth Vader against a large, concentrated group of Force-users before the former Jedi faced a large, probably less concentrated group of Jedi. Dathomir was practice for Jax Pavan and Galen Marek. It was also, although no historians would ever figure this out, and laughing grade school younglngs would only surmise it, arranged because Darth Sidious wanted to place Darth Vader and Darth Maul in proximity to one another and see what happened. Some combinations are primed to explode.

Darth Maul plunged through the forest. Leaves and vines whipped at him, but he ignored them and pressed through the paths of least resistance through the jungle. He was almost out of breath by the time he got to the Nightbrothers' walled compound.

Smoke obscured the walls. A ship had landed not far away, and he could see pointed silver wings and red and yellow landing lights that reminded him of the senate's color scheme.

Hadokar lunged out of the smoke. He didn't seem to be injured, but his cape was torn, revealing one splotched shoulder. As soon as he saw Maul he narrowed his eyes. "What have you brought down on us?"

The other man crouched, curled his fingers like claws, and Maul felt himself relax as he grew more and more certain that this person, one of the first kinsmen he had ever met, was going to lunge and try to kill him.

Talon ran out of the fog and grabbed Maul by the shoulder so hard that he almost spun the shorter man around. "They've taken Bao-Tan."

_Good_ , Maul thought. The kid was annoying. The Imperials probably wouldn't have to do a lot to break him, though, which could be dangerous.

Then, the sound of a ship descending fast through the atmosphere blasted from one side of the sky to the other. All three Zabraks looked up.

It was Yujan's ship, big and yawing. As Maul watched, the hatch cracked open and Draz leaned out, her hair whipping in the wind, waves of wind running across her clothing and crinkling it. More Nightbrothers ran out of the smoke, confused and angry. She gazed out over all of them, settled on Talon.

"The Nightsisters didn't want anything to do with us," Draz said over the roar of the ship. "They said the Empire won't come here, believe it can't."

"The Empire is coming!" Talon yelled back even as the crowd of Nightbrothers grumbled and shuffled forward, thinking that maybe they could board the ship and get out.

"Did you offend yours too?" Draz said, momentarily light-hearted, but then his words sank in. "The Empire? Hurry up - get in!"

She banged on the hull of the ship and it lurched lower, kicking up dirt that stung Maul's eyes and then made him squeeze them shut. The crowd began to shout.

Talon immediately ran toward the ship, took a flying leap, and missed. As he fell down he grabbed the edge of the ramp. Draz nearly stepped on him in her surprise, but then helped him clamber up, grabbing his wrist and the back of his shirt.

"Come on!" Draz pushed Talon aside and leaned out, extending a hand toward Maul. Nightbrothers shoved forward, pushed Maul. He stood his ground and dug his toes into the dirt. Draz recoiled, her lips curling, but then reconsidered and banged on the hull again. The ship lurched downward. "Don't shove!" Draz shouted as the Nightbrothers crowded onto the ship. "We can't fit all of you..." She started to look worried.

Maul shook his head. He was staying now, he knew. Vader was here, and where one Sith was there must be two, to fight or to forge. They drew each other like magnets.

"What are you doing?" Draz said, moving aside for another Zabrak to get in. The crowd wasn't endless, though - many were probably still occupied by the Imperial ship. About ten men had boarded Yujan's ship, only slightly more than the number of nonhuman activists who had abandoned the mission when they learned Yujan was flying the banner of the Rebellion. Draz barked at Maul when he didn't move. "Stupid!"

"I'll hold them off!" Maul said, the words sounding foreign to himself, his gaze sliding away from the ship even as he spoke them just to get the Rebels to leave. He wasn't paying attention any more. It was definitely Vader. That presence batted at him. "I will stay here," he muttered.

Draz sighed, a sharp sound like she was chastising him, but she eased backward. "Good luck."

Shouts erupted from the other side of the enclave, and then, the unmistakable hum of a lightsaber, throaty and deep. Draz turned and shut the airlock.

Maul plunged into the smoke.

He could see stormtroopers in white armor, but, strangely, they weren't moving, just standing still with their guns held across their chests. They were placed evenly, like a corral. When they saw Maul, they would just look at him, some of them shifting close together.

They were driving the Nightbrothers toward something, and most of their job was already done.

In the first glimpse Maul had of Vader, the other Force user was a black pillar just like in Maul's dream. A curve of smoke blurred and distorted the shape, making the pillar break into waving clouds. Maul could see from where he stood that both a thatch roof and the triangular-winged Imperial ship were on fire: the ship had probably gotten a few laser strikes into the tiny village before the Zabraks had somehow retaliated.

There was a Nightbrother sprawled out in front of Vader. As Maul watched, Vader brought his lightsaber down in a move that Maul recognized. It was a move made out of either arrogance or desperation, and here with his opponent in the dirt it was probably the former. Vader stabbed the man through the collar, slashed back and forth a few times to messy the wound, and stepped over his twitching victim.

Maul looked at him. The Force prickled, and Maul knew that Vader had seen him. He itched to fight right here, but the smoke was thick. Instead he moved, trying to draw Vader into the forest. After running through it twice Maul felt he had a better handle on which leaves were stable and which would slide, which plants were thicker than they looked and which could be easily pushed aside. He could use that advantage over Vader just like Zanja had used it against him.

But instead of going after him, Vader turned and took two almost inhumanly long strides toward his ship. Maul furrowed his brow. Vader was going to try to strafe him from above! That was not the behavior he had expected from a lord of the Sith. There was supposed to be honor in these things, wasn't there? Even if Maul didn't have a lightsaber, a one-on-one duel was something that he had thought would be inevitable.

Vader didn't seem to think so.

Maul backed into the forest as the ship rose up. Vader didn't waste time, and began strafing the forest with thick yellow laser blasts even as the ship - Maul couldn't recognize the model, but it was small enough to be maneuverable while still carrying at least a squad of ten stormtroopers - continued to smoke.

Vader tracked him for a long time.

Long, boring hours, while stormtroopers were forming up in runic maneuvers to try to drive him one way or another. Maul had had a lot of practice in not being driven. He moved with the currents of the men and the ship which were also the currents of the Force, and soon, Vader would have to realize, the only rock Maul would collide with would be Vader. Maul crouched in the forest, smelling the spicy red sap of crushed leaves, and listened to the quiet. There were surely birds hidden in the trees, nestling up against ridges of tree bark, waiting for the predators to go on about their business and leave the birds alone.

Finally, the ship settled again. Maul lost it when it settled into the clearing. The forest was too thick now, and he was hopelessly lost, far from the Nightbrothers' camp. That didn't matter, though, not really - what mattered was that Vader would come to him, would be baited by Maul's hiding.

It worked. Maul heard Vader come crashing indiscriminately through the trees a few minutes later, sensed his angry, bitter presence. There was something familiar about it, perhaps just because Maul had imagined that the man from his dream would have a similar presence.

"Where have you been hiding?" Vader called, and Maul eased out of the forest, letting dappled shadows fall over his shoulders.

"Do you know what I am?" he said.

"I know who you are."

Maul shook his head. "That matters less."

Only then did the lightsaber come out. Vader swung his blade like he was cutting down a tree. The red plasma cut an arc into the sunlit day, and Maul didn't even have to step backward. He wished he had his own lightsaber, could nearly feel it in his hands. He could balance it between his hands and dip to the right and strike-

So easy, so perfect.

Impossible. The fantasy dissipated like cloud, although like dew he could still feel it on his palms.

Vader's blade was a scarlet spike.

Darth Maul drew his blaster. For the first time, the gun in his hands felt like a tiny thing, a toy dwarfed by his palm.

Vader made a sound that was almost a deep laugh and almost a smirk. Then he swept the blade up, left to right, aiming for the gun or the hand holding the gun. Maul saw it as clear as a vision that he was aiming to lop Maul's hand off.

Maul circled the blade and shot Vader in the chest.

Two bolts sparked off his armor, dissipating harmlessly into the ground. The man backed up, though, lurching. He was nearly two feet taller than Maul, and when he fell, he would fall like a tree.

"I know exactly who you are," Vader said, and Maul knew that the first few moves of their fight had been just a delay; Vader had wanted to say this. "You killed Qui-Gon Jinn. You tried, and failed to kill Obi-Wan Kenobi. You have..." he paused as if he was not sure what word to use next. Vader had an orator's voice, but not an orator's head. Maul could sense his impatience as he wasted time choosing words. "... _hounded_ the Sith for a long time, Darth Maul. Now, it's over."

"How do you know my name?"

Vader paused.

"Only my Master knew," Maul said. "And the Jedi, because they found the records he left behind."

The anger that the word 'Jedi' elicited in Vader helped Maul identify him more quickly, because Maul so intimately knew that anger. He had had to quell it a lot, on Glee Anselm, but he knew exactly what it felt like when someone vehemently denied that they were a Jedi, and so Vader's personal addictions to that particular emotion stood out to him. Maul remembered another presence who had glowed with light like this one exuded dark, and he had to blink a few times and feel out the Force before he knew.

_Anakin._ Maul's anger blazed.

Vader's did too. As soon as he knew that Maul had discovered his name he retracted the Force, pulling his name out like a whip from under Maul's hands.

"Skywalker," Maul said, and the birds exploding out of the tree canopy echoed it, taking the name out with them, creating a pictogram from it as natural as falling, as natural as flying.

Vader slashed downward.

Maul skidded out of the way, kicking up dirt, not gaining as much momentum as he would have liked. He shot twice again, and Vader deflected both shots with his lightsaber. Light flared in front of Maul, and the Force hurled him out of the way of the returning blasts. Maul reached out both hands, the fingers clawed and the heels of his hands pressed together, and tried to wrench Vader's lightsaber out of his grasp.

It almost worked. The blade shook, and Vader hunched his shoulders with the effort it took him to hold it.

Maul foresaw that he wouldn't let go. The Zabrak would need some new strategy, something else. The Force prodded him backward, and the instant he let go of Vader's lightsaber he somersaulted backwards into the trees. Landing in a crouch on a thick branch, he watched the other Sith stalk forward.

_Anakin._ Maul almost laughed. The boy had not been angelic even as a child, but in his teenage years his annoyances had been so _petty_. Funny that they had grown him into this, that his hatred had taken him down such a grand path for reasons as small and petty as the jealousy of one man and the love of one woman.

Vader jumped.

Maul had not expected him to be able to jump so high. He nearly _flew_ , his cloak billowing out behind him, his body stiff and his arms held out in front of him like a child pretending to fly like a starship.

He leapt down from the tree just in time to see Vader's feet hit the branch and crack it. The tree shook, leaves raining down onto the smaller foliage on the forest floor. When Maul stepped backward again he was surprised to feel not the feathery touch of more plants, but empty space and a downward-trending landscape. He glanced behind him. Vader fell into the forest with a crash, standing up with his lightsaber still lit and anger burning just as bright in Maul's mind's eye, but Maul had seen the pit behind him now, a small crater lined with ridges like tiny concentric mountain ranges. An old meteor strike, the ground still burned black and bronze with strange energies. Boulders lined its edges, and Maul had a momentary, pleasant vision of Vader lying crushed under one of those speeder-sized rocks. That would even kill a Sith.

He moved back into the pit just as Vader leapt for him again. "Are you frightened, Sith?" Vader shouted, swinging his lightsaber in a choppy, ungainly arc that sliced through the moss-colored side of a boulder. Spores and dirt puffed outward. Maul bared his teeth and pressed them tight together, only loosening his mouth when he needed to move again. Maul jumped to the top of the rock, crouched there, and shot two bolts toward Vader. This too-bold pattern was easy to predict, though, and Maul immediately slid down the other side of the boulder, the dust caking his hands, and blasted once more from his hidden space. Vader cleaved the boulder in two, knocking one red-glowing half into another cluster of rocks.

Maul was tired of running, tired of his predictable pattern. He shot once more, dashed forward. Vader aimed a swing at his shoulder, but Maul had the measure of those wide, slow swings now. The way Vader wielded a lightsaber, the blade looked heavy, and Maul knew very well that it was not. Just as the tip of the brightly glowing red blade touched the ground Vader punched out at Vader's chest, diverting a moment later to hit the weaker looking cloth at his armpit instead of the armor. It only hurt Maul's knuckles.

He immediately retracted, realizing that Vader had either armor under the cloth or had mechanical limbs, but continued with the kick he had been readying to throw at Vader's side. It impacted, and there was some flesh there - Maul felt it give slightly under his metal foot, and Vader howled, a deep sound of anguish that sent more birds rocketing out of the forest in fear. Maul dropped that foot and picked the other one up at the same instant, hooking Vader's other wrist with a kick. He ducked a lightsaber strike that swept over his head and lashed his foot away from Vader's wrist hard enough to break it. As he was beginning to expect, it did not break.

Vader stepped back one long step, his feet slipping on the rocky ground, putting enough distance between them that Maul was in dangerous reach of the lightsaber again. He was in the moment now, though, in the way that both the Jedi and the Sith taught, seeing each move almost before it happened in a transparent overlay over the real world. His plans took only seconds to adjust, perception flying by faster than words could travel. Vader stabbed forward, a straightforward push that foreshortened the lightsaber in Maul's sight into a single dot of light.

Maul dodged to the left, pointed his blaster at Vader's foot, and fired. Cloth scorched, but the man did not seem to be troubled by the blast.

So, it was to be a fight of attrition.

Vader's next strike was faster, and he caught Maul's left pant leg on the burning edge of the blade. Maul hissed, and reeled backwards, but he was far more agile than Vader and was not hurt, instead using the time in which Vader stared at the metal leg thus revealed to dance around to Vader's back. The man's neck was wisely covered in a plain sheet of metal, and although Maul ached to aim a punch at the back of his head he knew it would only hurt his hands. Instead Maul reached out with the blaster, shot three times. On the third, something exploded near Vader's right eye.

Maul reached into the blind spot, turned the blaster so that the top, flat except for the small scope, lay against Vader's neck, and grabbed the muzzle of the gun with his right hand. He practically had to climb up Vader's back to pull the other man in an arc backwards and complete the choke.

Vader was far taller, though, and when he spun around he dragged Maul with him and broke the hold. His lightsaber slashed down again and broke another boulder in two, which rolled into more.

Boulders started to spill over the side of the crater. There were enough of them that they might fill it.

Just like Maul had wanted, the bowl of rock was suffering an avalanche, but Vader was not in the right place. Maul was up hill from him now, and the boulders were rolling away from both of them, turning the crater with its delicate ridges into a hole that was about to be filled and flattened by the boulders.

Both Sith scrambled out of the crater, only to teeter on the edge of a cliff. Trees grew in scattered copses on the sides and bottom of this larger crater. It was huge, the size of a canyon - Maul could barely see the other side, and the wind and water-carved rock pushing up from its sides looked like cities. A narrow pool glimmered at the bottom.

Maul shot at Vader's foot again. He thought he might try distraction, and started to speak without knowing how the sentence was going to end - "Anakin!"

Vader had become immune to his name. He stabbed forward, and Maul leaped over the blade in a Force-assisted burst, but felt the lightsaber nick his leg. When he landed the wound flared, but it was minor - he could still stand, didn't feel muscle coming undone or bone grating together.

He pushed out with both hands, fingers splayed around the blaster butt, pushing out with the Force as if to slam Vader in the armored chest with both palms. The strike hit, and Vader bent backward toward the cliff, like ancient architecture crumbling. The red lightsaber pointed toward the distant crater wall, and Maul gestured again, right hand clawed, and threw two small, broken rocks at Vader's hand and hip. They broke his balance completely.

Maul had just started to grin, just started to watch Vader's fall blend in to the rocks that had tumbled some time between now and the creation of the planet, when he felt the tug on his injured foot.

The Force betrayed him. Vader was pulling from beyond the cliff edge, and the burst of pain from his injured leg prevented Maul from breaking the grip immediately. Instead, he gasped as his chest smacked against the dirt and forced his breath out. His skin prickled. Vader was somewhere behind him, still alive.

Jut when he turned his head, his cheek covered in dirt, he felt himself falling further over the edge of the cliff.

He released the blaster in an effort to catch at the ground, but then the Force rose again, and even as Maul turned to retaliate, orienting himself against the spiraling tornado wind of Vader's pull, he felt the ground slam into him. A flash of Bandomeer. What creatures lived beneath this world's surface? His skin prickled, but the vision was torn from him as he rolled, brown dirt spraying around him. All immediate tumult.

Vader fell above him like a black tower.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, it's been fun to get inside Maul's head. This is the end of the story. I have ideas about where a sequel might go, but am not sure if that sequel will ever be written. Thank you to those people who have left reviews, as well as the Star Wars fandom in general. Here's to Dec. 18.

Vader fought him, caught him for a moment in what was almost an embrace. Maul strained against metal arms as both of them fell, the rocks tumbling around them. Metal legs clanked against metal legs. For a moment a Force presence seemed to whip past them along with the rest of the scenery - his mother Zanja was out there somewhere, watching. Rocks clattered around the sound of Vader's lightsaber. Maul tucked his head against Vader's chest and held on until the two of them rolled apart at the bottom. If he was going to be stabbed with the lightsaber Vader had been too stupid or bloodthirsty to put out, he would take Vader with him.

At the bottom, Vader lay as if crucified. Maul rolled to a crouch. His burnt leg felt shaky, so he pushed up with his left instead and reached out to pull the blaster to him. It had snagged in a rock fall on the wall of the crater. The avalanche had not quite filled the depression in the earth: he and Vader lay at the bottom of the shallow depression, the ground littered with vines and boulders waiting to trap an ankle.

Before Maul could pull the blaster from the rocks, Vader stood up.

It was as if he stole the Force from Maul's hands. Maul felt himself lifted, his entire body constrained. The pain in his shoulders was emphasized now, while his legs felt invisible and useless, like they belonged to someone else. Maybe to Vader, even more of a machine than Maul had ever been.

Skywalker, though, had been something else.

If Maul couldn't kill Vader, surely he could kill Skywalker- the Jedi boy, the one who had always been hounding Obi-Wan's feet as Obi-Wan hounded Maul's, the one who now hurt because he had lost the privilege of being a student.

Vader, Palpatine's pet, the Jedi who had never earned the right to his title the way Maul had. Who was he to walk proudly? He had no right to hate.

Even as Vader lifted him into the air by the throat. Maul dug around in the Skywalker-persona he remembered and the fragments of the one Vader projected. "I have seen your hatred, the Jedi losses to which you cling."

Vader burned and tightened his grip.

"And so many lost..." Maul eked out.

Vader's momentary shock was almost enough to get him to let go. Maul almost smirked. There was another presence swirling around in Vader's thoughts too, and old wound almost healed but connected to newer ones by still-bleeding runnels. _Fear is my ally, and the Force shall set me free._

Anakin was afraid of thinking about his apprentice. Maul knew very little about the last of Qui-Gon's lineage, but identity didn't matter. All that mattered was that Vader's fear and hatred vortexed around the idea of an apprentice but were not fed from it.

(Not so afraid as he was of thinking about his Master, but Maul was not sure what his own emotions would do if he thought too much about Obi-Wan here, within Anakin's umbra. It would blind him, and his task right now was to try to keep _Vader_ the blind one.)

Vader squeezed tighter on Maul's throat, making his vision swim and flash. Maul struggled, digging his heels into the dirt. "Find the Padawan next -"

The boulders rose up behind them and blasted forward, brown and gray and shadowed, as heavy as starships. One caught Vader in the back and pitched him forward. Maul tried to whip his legs up to kick Vader back, but succeeded only in hitting his mask with his knees. It was enough to put some distance between them when they hit the ground. Maul crawled backwards while Vader levered himself up on his elbows. The rocks were still falling without Maul's push, though, tumbling over one another on the hill. A boulder struck his shoulder and immediately numbed it. He didn't understand why the pain was flaring on his other side until he saw that he'd hit the ground, next to a patch of grass. The cacophony of the stones still rang out as more fell toward him. Metal creaked - Vader trying to get up? Dark spots started getting bigger in front of Maul's eyes. His metal legs should still work, but the pain in his upper body was cutting them off from him, blurring his thoughts.

Why did Anakin Skywalker have to win this way? (Or lose this way, but, Maul thought really, win.) Why did Maul's brother have to die before he remembered who he was? Cruel world, cruel words, cruel Glee Anselm sea. So be it. Maul closed his eyes.

* * *

As soon as he opened them again he was struggling.

He pushed to his feet, immediately landing square on the pebble-strewn ground, looking around fully alert. Zanja crouched next to him with a burning crock filled with what looked like pieces of sticks and leaves in her left hand.

"This is the third time a witch has saved your life," Zanja said. "What are you going to do now?"

Maul shook his head, trying to dislodge his fuzzy thoughts. "Go back into the galaxy. Not now. When I'm ready."

"Good. You can't stay here. I don't imagine that you want to be a Nightbrother. It would be a challenge for you to become a warrior."

"You didn't save me. I landed on my feet."

"And then hit your head."

They stared levelly at one another. He sat up fast, felt cold air on his wounded shoulder and saw that she had torn his sleeves off and put some of the herb poultice on bruises and scrapes. "Why did you help me?"

She shrugged. "Residual kindness. I tend to birds too. I cannot do anything for your leg."

He sat up and dug his toes into the rocky ground, then stood up. The wounded leg felt disjointed, as if its parts weren't working as efficiently as they should, but it took his weight. He would have to look at the knee and make repairs or reinforcements there, later. For a moment he missed his common room couch on Kasen's ship.

"Where's Vader?"

"The Imperial ship picked him up and left."

"He didn't kill me."

"You put up a good fight," she said. The words smacked of flattery, and the Force soured. He snarled and pushed a thought into her mind, urging her to continue on that train of thought.

"Come back with me," she said, as if she had not noticed his influence. At the same time, he considered what he thought were unlikely reasons for Vader to leave him behind: that the other Sith had thought he was dead, that Sidious had ordered that Maul should live. They bothered him like a sneeze, tickling the back of his throat.

"Why?"

"You will help me in my work. There is much to discover of the dark side here. Are you curious about the things that lurk in the dark forests?"

He shook his head. "Your people are not my people."

"You are a Nightbrother."

"Was I? And what else am I, mother?"

"You are a child like those in our legends."

"I do not remember any legends." He sniffed the air, catching dust and the herbs she used. Where was his blaster? He stood up and started searching, stepping carefully between the stones.

"You would not be kept with the other men."

He hadn't thought of the Nightbrothers' enslavement. Suddenly Zanja's words were more ominous. I promise not to enslave you? It was not a hard bargain. "I'm looking for my gun."

"It must have been lost when the rocks fell."

Aah. There it was. He turned a mossy stone over with his boot and found only a dark green vine. He raised his head, kept his back to Zanja. "So that is what it feels like when you're lying."

She had been lying for a long time.

As he turned she was narrowing her eyes, but giving nothing else away on her face.

He could see the blaster laying behind one of the larger rocks, wedged in a crack. The metal top looked like a ribbon between the many-colored rock faces. "Ah," Maul said. "There it is."

Zanja disappeared. She did not use the thick green smoke that Talzin favored, but instead the air simply folded around her, glimpses of blue and white and silver before she magicked herself away and left the smell of the poultice behind.

When he reached the blaster he found that it had been crushed beyond recognition, the barrel completely gone somewhere under the rockfall. It might be good as a grenade, now, but certainly not as a gun.

Maul turned his back to her and walked back toward the forest.

Had she really been his mother? The Force had been telling him otherwise, quietly, and when it had become loud enough he listened to it. That was how it had always been, since Coruscant. Not since Dathomir. Maul had become accustomed to being no one's.

Where now? He cast his senses out, feeling over the trees and creeping things to find the Empire in its metal ships. Vader would be a powerful, poisonous presence up there in the sky. Maul felt only traces, like the ions left behind from their drives. He could follow it if he quieted, if he was still for a very long time and took the sort of short steps he had taken already. If he hitched a ride with a smuggler or a Nightbrother-slave.

Maul was tired of short steps.

He scaled the first tree with low-lying branches, but found that it was difficult to progress that way for very long. The branches were black and narrow, and they were too weak to take his weight, especially with his metal legs. He dropped down, pushed his way between fallen trees and through poisonous-looking clumps of stiff grasses.

As soon as he arrived at the hut, he knew that it was empty. Zanja's presence had long departed, leaving only Maul's memory of the workshop to guide him in a slow circle around the house. He found an empty garage and kicked-up leaves: she had taken a speeder bike.

Maul looked into the forest, heard the hooting there and sensed hard, fast lives.

Wondered where he had gone wrong. He had lost something of himself and had been going wrong for a long time, even since he had decided not to go to Coruscant and encounter Sidious and the man he now knew to be Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker. Back then, though, he had not been used to doubting himself, and it had felt as if the Force had hinted that his choice to stay his course was right. Had even then it been setting something in him, some geas to take him out of the world, to make him a more serene, more solitary person?

No. There was not that much meaning in the world. Fear was his compass. What did he fear now? He could still smell the herbs the witch kept in her hut. He would be the last of the Sith after all, as he had always been destined to be. He would see the last of the Jedi, even if he was far away from that goal now. The last would be the last for him because he would command that moment. He would control its singularity, its purpose. Fear was modulated, but not removed, by control.

He wouldn't want to erase the fear.

He tried to catch up with the speeder bike. By ground or by tree it was too far away, leaving him bent over and panting, beginning to feel lost in the forest. Maybe he could loop around toward the Nightbrother complex, but someone there would probably try to stop him at least to find out what had happened when the Empire had landed. He could almost hear the bike ahead of hm. Zanja was right there, afraid but not in the same way that he was. Her fear was more panic, less tool, and he marveled that he had ever thought she was his mother, or bothered to work the relationship into his equations. Perhaps she was going to Mother Talzin, the one who had already shown her willingness to turn Maul and those like him into strong weapons in someone else's war.

He reached out along the path she had taken, sighting along his hands like a sniper. Beyond his reach, Zanja hunched over the steering veins of the speeder bike, nervous.

He felt his arms shaking, rolled his shoulders to dislodge the creeping tension. Vader had fought _so well._ He had fought like a Force user, and it had been far too long since Maul had experienced that -

Someone had to be killed today.

* * *

Rook Kast shoved the lever down and watched Dathomir resolve out of the starfield in front of her. Beside her, Gar Saxon turned his black and red helmet toward her for one dismissive moment before focusing back on the view. No one hailed them from Dathomir, even though they were within range of most conventional forms of transmission. Kast had expected this. All sources said that Dathomir was a primitive, isolationist planet, and that its inhabitants didn't care who got lost on the surface. A planet was a big place. Tourists were likely to be eaten by rancors, or just get lost.

Kast started to scan for places to set down the Kom'rk fighter.

"The Empire's already here," Saxon said matter-of-factly. He pointed out the window with one stubby finger while craning his neck toward her console to look at the displays. He was right - a Star Destroyer lurked off to port, barely visible. Kast imagined it as a silver needle.

"They don't care we're here," she said, adjusting the controls she needed to complete the shift over from hyperdrive coasting to sublight.

"They might care that he's here."

"If he even is," she said.

Saxon sat back in his jumpseat and folded his arms, still watching the controls. She had been working with him long enough that she could almost track his line of sight through two helmets and in her peripheral vision. Both of them had thought that Maul had been a beacon of hope for what remained of the Mandalorians (the true Mandalorians, lethal, organized, and dropping in number through both death and disinterest.)

"You heard the man," Saxon said. "We pay an information specialist that much to track one tiny ship here, and we ought to get our credits worth. Lord Maul might not have been part of that refugee group after all, but you backed me up on it."

The refugees from Glee Anselm had indeed come to Dathomir, if the informant was correct. Kast nodded as she plotted a course that would skirt the Imperial destroyer in a semi-circle. "I'm just playing Sith's advocate."

"All of these ships aren't here because of the Nautolan councilman."

"No. Maybe something else. If we're lucky, they don't even care we're here."

She flew the half-circle and descended without incident, always looking at the radar as if glancing over her shoulder. The Imperial ship just sat there in the distance, almost too small to see. Kast shook her head. "We're a little in over our heads, Saxon."

He didn't reply. In all the times they had fought together, silence had meant assent.

For a few minutes she wasn't sure where to set down, so went into a low geosynchronous orbit. Now it was Saxon's turn to look at the radar every few seconds. Soon, though, both of them saw the clouds drift into spirals and the radar flare as as another ship lifted out of the atmosphere. "We'll follow that ship," Kast muttered, and kept orbiting.

It wasn't subtle, but the Imperials didn't seem to care about a small transport looking for a place in the inhospitable forest to land. Another ship, with the distinct three-winged silhouette of an Imperial shuttle, lifted off from the same location not long after them, and Kast switched tactics, diving down into the atmosphere.

She could tell immediately that the Imperial ship had come from one of the few villages in the area. The Nightbrother compound barely had enough space for the small ship to land, but something had been going on there recently. There was smoke rising from the forest nearby, and people gathering on the ramparts.

"From this distance they all look like him." Saxon had his eyes fixed on the primitive perimeter wall.

"Wait." The smoke was moving through the forest. Kast banked to follow a vehicle making the trail through the trees, feeling the atmosphere jostle against the hull. Saxon projected skepticism, but didn't say anything to dissuade her; the impression remained in the tilt of his shoulders.

Kast was right. She saw a dark figure at the edge of a road in the forest, saw the smoke rising from wreckage. "You'll have to go down there. I'll hold it as steady as I can."

Saxon grunted and got out of his seat.

Again Kast looked back and forth between the screens as she opened the rear ramp, holding the ship steady as it hovered just above the treetops. Saxon could easily fly down there, although returning with a person in tow might be more difficult. If she needed to talk to him helmet-to-helmet, the channel was open. Until then, she waited and kept the engines stable, and after far too long a wait she heard two knocks on the back hatch and a click in her mic.

She brought the ship up slowly, and couldn't help squinting toward the ground, dialing her filters up so that she could see how the ground had been torn up in furrows. It was as if the speeder had bounced or been dragged along the natural avenue before turning into wreckage.

Saxon plodded back into the bridge, with Maul edging around the bulkhead behind him.

Kast glanced over her shoulder. "Welcome back, Lord Maul."

Saxon fell into the navigator's chair. Maul, impersonally ungrateful, just nodded.

Maul looked out the viewport in the narrow gap between his Mandalorian lieutenants as the ship lifted above the atmosphere. He licked dry lips and wondered whether he was satisfied - by Vader's disappearance, by Kast and Saxon's return, by the memory of Sanja's corpse, her shoulder broken first when the Force grabbed her off of the speeder bike. Maul had stood up from beside the body just as Saxon jetted down. Hunting Jedi had given him a similar feeling of pleasant challenge. If only he had felt a Padawan braid in his fingers, not the Nightsister's stiff black hair.

Almost. It had almost been enough, to have his revenge upon at least one person.

And now? Vader was out there, but he was more the pillar man than Anakin. Maul shook his head, saw the Mandalorians respond to the movement with minute, semi-conscious shiftings of their gloved hands on the controls. He could go after the Empire. He could indulge that itch, give in to that pathway of vengeance as easy as falling asleep. Why not?

But why? To taunt Anakin? (Yes. To pique the apprentice of his Master, to bring the Chosen One to his knees. Yes.)

To fight Sidious? To show himself to the Master who had never come for him? Sidious had abandoned him to pirates as if he was a commoner, easily assassinated. What would it mean, to go back to his teacher? Maul's mind flinched away from it.

And the rebels? They also fought Vader, but were too secular to have drawn Sidious' Force-strong attention yet. They had accepted him as one of their own simply because of his species, which had made trust laughably easy.

The Death Watch was fragmented, but Kast and Saxon clearly still had some kind of structure, some kind of loyalty, left after the still-so-recent end of the Clone Wars.

He could see the fuzzy, blue edge of the atmosphere as Kast accelerated over the north pole of the planet. In the empty space between the Mandalorians' heads, the stars stared in their thousands. Maul said, "What do you know about alien dissidents?"

* * *

_You have fallen so far, my apprentice._

_This refusal to die is not admirable. You aren't a threat any longer, not if what Vader says is true. You had to be dragged away by the Nightsisters, that decimated coven of Force-pretenders. Maybe you will go back to being the barbarian you once were, that you always were. Savage wore his barbarism on his sleeve. That was part of why I did not concern myself with him until he meddled in something bigger._

_There is still healthy competition for Vader, in the Outer Rim colonies and among the crews of his own starships and hired killers, if not here on Imperial Center. He doesn't need an old dog nipping at his heels. Eventually, you will die. Vader will die too, but not before he has served his purpose. He can fight the Rebellion in ways you cannot. You were a good assassin for a short time, but always a terrible spy._

_I have no more plans for you._


End file.
